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Stories for CbilOren, 

¥ 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

BIMBI. 

i2mo. Paper, 40 cents; cloth, $1.00. 

Small 4to. Illustrated. $1.50. 

“ The nine stories for children, which ‘ Ouida' 
has written for the little Prince of Naples, and 
published under the title of ‘ Bimbi,' are the most 
fascinating little tales imaginable, pure in thought 
and purpose, charming in style, with surprising 
touches of wit, humor, and pathos ." — Boston 
Traveller. 

A DOG OF FLANDERS. 

Small 4to. Illustrated. Cloth, ;Ji.5o. 

" The present book contains four stories. The 
opening story, for pathetic beauty and descriptive 
power, has rarely been surpassed in the entire 
range of classic juveniles. The others are of 
a like touching, pathetic character, revealing on 
the part of the gifted author a tender sympathy 
with the poor and humble, and a wonderful power 
in picturing their every-day experiences.” — 
Boston Home Journal. 




He threw himself at her feet on the grass. 


Page 164, 


TWO 


Little Wooden Shoes 


A Story 


LOUISA DE LA RAME 

u 

(OUIDA) 

AUTHOR OF “bIMBI,” “a DOG OF FLANDERS,” ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED BY 
EDMUND H. GARRETT 


PHILADELPHIA 



J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

1897 


PX5 


Tw 


2 . 


Copyright, 1896, 

BY 

J. B. Lippincott Company. 


Electrotypeo and Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Phiuoelphia, U.S.A. 


PAGE 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



He threw himself at her feet on the grass . . . Frontispiece. 

When her prayer was done, she still kneeled 46 

A mariner’s tale of far-away lands and mysteries of the deep 72 
Looking around as she sat on the edge of the roof, with one 

foot on the highest rung of the ladder 99 

“ Who were those beautiful women ?” she said, suddenly . . 149 
There was a fantastic gloom from old armor and old weapons 

and old pictures in the dull rich chambers 231 




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


CHAPTER 1. 

EBEE sprang out of bed at daybreak. She 
was sixteen. 

It seemed a very wonderful thing to be 
as much as that — sixteen — a woman quite. 

A cock was crowing under her lattice — he said 
how old you are! — how old you are! — every time 
that he sounded his clarion. 

She opened the lattice and wished him good-day, 
with a laugh. It was so pleasant to be woke by 
him and to think that no one in all the world could 
ever call one a child any more. 

There was a kid bleating in the shed. There 
was a thrush singing in the dusk of the sycamore- 
leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother 
away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy 
muffled bells ringing in the distance from many 
steeples and belfries where the city was ; they all 
said one thing : “ How good it is to be so old as 
that — how good, how very good !’* 



9 



10 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Bdbde was very pretty. 

No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To 
look at her it seemed as if she had so lived among 
the flowers that she had grown like them, and only 
looked a bigger blossom — that was all. 

She wore two little wooden shoes and a little 
cotton cap, and a gray kirtle — linen in summer, 
serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes 
were like rose-leaves, and the cap was as white as 
a lily, and the gray kirtle was like the bark of the 
bough that the apple-blossom parts, and peeps out 
of, to blush in the sun. 

The flowers had been the only godmothers that 
she had ever had, and fairy godmothers too. 

'T’he marigolds and the sunflowers had given her 



their ripe, rich gold to tint her hair; the lupins 
and irises had lent their azure to her eyes; the 
moss-rose buds had made her pretty mouth ; the 
arum lilies had uncurled their softness for her skin ; 
and the lime-blossoms had given her their frank, 
fresh, innocent fragrance. 

The winds had blown, and the rains had rained, 
and the sun had shone on her, indeed, and had 
warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they had 
only given to her body and her soul a hardy, breeze- 
blown freshness like that of a field cowslip. 

She had never been called anything but Beb6e. 

One summer day Antoine Maes — a French sub- 
ject, but a Belgian by adoption and habit, an old 
man who got his meagre living by tilling the gar- 
den-plot about his hut and selling flowers in the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


11 


city squares — Antoine, going into Brussels for his 
day’s trade, had seen a gray bundle floating among 
the water-lilies in the bit of water near his hut and 
had hooked it out to land, and found a year-old 
child in it, left to drown, no doubt, hut saved by 
the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate. 

Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, or 
some peasant woman harder of heart than the oxen 
in her yoke, had left it there to drift away to death, 
not reckoning for the inward ripple Of the current 
or the toughness of the lily-leaves and stems. 

Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife, a 
childless and aged soul, begged leave to keep it; 
and the two poor lonely, simple folks grew to 
care for the homeless, motherless thing, and they 
and the people about all called it Bebee — only 
B6h6e. 

The church got at it and added to it a saint’s 
name ; but for all its little world it remained Bebee 
— Bebee when it trotted no higher than the red 
carnation-heads ; — Bebee when its yellow curls 
touched as high as the lavender-bush ; — Bebee on 
this proud day when the thrush’s song and the 
cock’s crow found her sixteen years old. 

Old Antoine’s hut stood in a little patch of 
garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, 
in that byway which lies between Laeken and 
Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, 
where there are beautiful meadows and tall, 
flowering hedges, and forest-trees, and fern-fllled 
ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and cool, 


12 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


where the swans sail all day long, and the silvery 
willows dip and sway with the wind. 

Turn aside from the highway, and there it lies 
to-day, and all the place brims over with grass, and 
boughs, and blossoms, and flowering beans, and, 
wild dog-roses ; and there are a few cottages and 
cabins there near the pretty water, and farther 
there is an old church, sacred to St. Guido ; and 
beyond go the green level country and the end- 
less wheat-flelds, and the old mills with their red 
sails against the sun; and beyond all these the 
pale blue, sea-like horizon of the plains of Flan- 
ders. 

It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a 
sea-shell, in the fashion that the I^etherlanders love; 
and its two little square lattices were dark with 
creeping plants and big rose-bushes, and its roof, 
80 low that you could touch it, was golden and 
green with all the lichens and stoneworts that are 
known on earth. 

Here Bebee grew from year to year ; and soon 
learned to be big enough and hardy enough to tie 
up bunches of stocks and pinks for the market, 
and then to carry a basket for herself, trotting by 
Antoine’s side along the green roadway and into 
the white, wide streets; and in the market the 
buyers — most often of all when they were young 
mothers — would seek out the little golden head 
and the beautiful frank blue eyes, and buy Bebee’s 
lilies and carnations whether they wanted them or 
not. So that old Maes used to cross himself and 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


13 


say that, thanks to Our Lady, trade was thrice as 
stirring since the little one had stretched out her 
rosy fingers with the flowers. 

All the same, however stirring trade might be 
in summer, when the long winters came and the 
Montagne de la Cour was a sharp slope of ice, and 
the pinnacles of St. Gudule were all frosted white 
with snow, and the hot-house flowers alone could 
fill the market, and the country gardens were 
bitter black wind-swept desolations where the 
chilly roots huddled themselves together under- 
ground like homeless children in a cellar, — then 
the money gained in the time of leaf and blossom 
was all needed to buy a black loaf and fagot of 
wood ; and many a day in the little pink hut Bebee 
rolled herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to 
forget in sleep that she was supperless and as cold 
as a frozen robin. 

So that when Antoine Maes grew sick and died, 
more from age and weakness than any real disease, 
there were only a few silver crowns in the brown 
jug hidden in the thatch; and the hut itself, with 
its patch of ground, was all that he could leave to 
Bebee. 

‘‘ Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it to 
worry you, and be good to the bird and the goat, 
and be sure to keep the flowers blowing,’’ said the 
old man with his last breath; and sobbing her 
heart out by his bedside, Bebee vowed to do his 
bidding. 

She was not quite fourteen then, and when she 
2 


14 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


had laid her old friend to rest in the rough green 
graveyard about St. Guido, she was very sorrow- 
ful and lonely — ^poor little, bright Bebee, who had 
never hardly known a worse woe than to run the 
thorns of the roses into her fingers, or to cry be- 
cause a thrush was found starved to death in the 
snow. 

Bebee went home, and sat down in a corner and 
thought. 

The hut was her own, and her own the little 
green triangle just then crowded with its Mayday 
blossom in all the colors of the rainbow. She was 
to live in it, and never let the fiowers die — so he 
had said ; good, rough old ugly Antoine Maes, who 
had been to her as father, mother, country, king, 
and law. 

The sun was shining. 

Through the little square of the lattice she could 
see the great tulips opening in the grass and a bough 
of the apple-tree swaying in the wind. A chaffinch 
clung to the bough, and swung to and fro singing. 
The door stood open, with the broad, bright day 
beaming through ; and Bebee’s little world came 
streaming in with it — the world which dwelt in the 
half-dozen cottages that fringed this green lane of 
hers like beavers’-nests pushed out under the leaves 
on to the water’s edge. 

They came in, six or eight of them, all women ; 
trim, clean, plain Brabant peasants, hard working, 
kindly of nature, and shrewd in their own simple 
matters ; people who labored in the fields all the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 15 

day long, or worked themselves blind over tl e lace 
pillows in the city. 

“ You are too young to live alone, Bebee,” said 
the first of them. “ My old mother shall come and 
keep house for you.” 

“ !N'ay — better come and live with me, Bebee,” 
said the second. “ I will give you bit and drop, and 
clothing, too, for the right to your plot of ground.” 

“ That is to cheat her,” said the third. “ Hark 
here, Bebee : my sister, who is a lone woman, as 
you know well, shall come and bide with you, and 
ask you nothing — nothing at all — only you shall 
just give her a crust, perhaps, and a few flowers to 
sell sometimes.” 

“Ho, no,” said the fourth; “that will not do. 
You let me have the garden and the hut, Bebee, 
and my sons shall till the place for you ; and I will 
live with you myself, and leave the boys the cabin 
— so you will have all the gain, do you not see, 
dear little one ?” 

“ Pooh !” said the fifth, stouter and better clothed 
than the rest. “ You are all eager for your own 
good, not for hers. How I — Father Francis says 
we should all do as we would be done by — I will take 
Bebee to live with me, all for nothing ; and we will 
root the flowers up and plant it with good cabbages 
and potatoes and salad plants. And I will stable 
my cows in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man, 
and I will take my chance of making money out of 
it, and no one can speak more fair than that when 
one sees what weather is, and thinks what insects 


16 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


do ; and all the year round, winter and summer, 
Bebee here will want for nothing, and have to take 
no care for herself whatever.’* 

She who spoke, M^re Krebs, was the best-to-do 
woman in the little lane, having two cows of .her 
own and ear-rings of solid silver, and a green cart, 
and a big dog that took the milk into Brussels. 
She was heard, therefore, with respect, and a short 
silence followed her words. 

But it was very short ; and a hubbub of voices 
crossed each other after it as the speakers grew 
hotter against one another and more eager to con- 
vince each other of the disinterestedness and deli- 
cacy of their offers of aid. 

Through it all Bebee sat quite quiet on the edge 
of the little truckle-bed, with her eyes fixed on the 
apple-bough and the singing chaffinch. 

She heard them all patiently. 

They were all her good friends, friends old and 
true. This one had given her cherries a score of 
summers. That other had bought her a little waxen 
J esus at the Kermesse. The old woman in the blue 
linen skirt had taken her to her first communion. 
She who wanted her sister to have the crust and 
the fiowers, had brought her a beautiful painted 
book of hours that had cost a whole franc. Another 
had given her the solitary wonder, travel, and 
foreign feast of her whole life — a day fifteen miles 
away at the fair at Mechlin. The last speaker of 
all had danced her on her knee a hundred times in 
babyhood, and told her legends, and let her ride 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 17 

in the green cart behind big curly-coated Tam- 
bour. 

Bebee did not doubt that these trusty old friends 
meant well by her, and yet a certain heavy sense 
fell on her that in all these counsels there was not 
tlie same whole-hearted and frank goodness that 
had prompted the gifts to her of the waxen Jesus, 
and the Kermesse of Mechlin. 

Bebee did not reason, because she was too little 
a thing and too trustful ; but she felt, in a vague, 
sorrowful fashion, that they were all of them 
trying to make some benefit out of her poor little 
heritage, with small regard for herself at the root 
of their speculations. 

Bebee was a child ; wholly a child ; body and 
soul were both as fresh in her as a golden crocus 
just born out of the snows. But she was not a 
little fool, though people sometimes called her so 
because she would sit in the moments of her 
leisure with her blue eyes on the far-away clouds 
like a thing in a dream. 

She heard them patiently till the cackle of shrill 
voices had exhausted itself, and the six women 
stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut eyeing 
each other with venomous glances ; for though they 
were good neighbors at all times, each, in this mat- 
ter, was hungry for the advantages to be got out 
of old Antoine’s plot of ground. They were very 
poor ; they toiled in the scorched or frozen fields 
all weathers, or spent from dawn to nightfall pour- 
ing over their cobweb lace ; and to save a sou or 

2 * B 


18 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


gain a cabbage was of moment to them only second 
to the keeping of their souls secure of heaven by 
Lenten mass and Easter psalm. 

Bebee listened to them all, and the tears dried 
on her cheeks, and her pretty rosebud lips curled 
close in one another. 

“ You are very good, no doubt, all of you,’’ she 
said at last. “But I cannot tell you that I am 
thankful, for my heart is like a stone, and I think 
it is not so very much for me as it is for the hut 
that you are speaking. Perhaps it is wrong in me 
to say so — yes, I am wrong, I am sure, — you are 
all kind, and I am only Bebee. But you see he 
told me to live here and take care of the flowers, 
and I must do it, that is certain. I will ask Father 
Francis, if you wish ; but if he tells me I am 
wrong, as you do, I shall stay here all the same.” 

And in answer to their expostulations and con- 
demnation, she only said the same thing over again 
always, in difierent words, but to the same stead- 
fast purpose. The women clamored about her for 
an hour in reproach and rebuke ; she was a baby 
indeed, she was a little fool, she was a naughty, 
obstinate child, she was an ungrateful willful little 
creature, who ought to be beaten till she was blue, 
if only there was anybody that had the right to 
do it ! 

“But there is nobody that has the right,” said 
Bebee, getting angry and standing upright on the 
floor, with Antoine’s old gray cat in her round 
arms. “ He told me to stay here, and he would 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


19 


not have said so if it had been wrong ; and I am 
old enough to do for myself, and I am not afraid, 
and who is there that would hurt me ? Oh, yes ; 
go and tell Father Francis, if you like. I do not 
believe he will blame me, but if he do, I must 
bear it. Even if he shut the church door on me, 
I will obey Antoine, and the flowers will know I 
am right, and they will let no evil spirits touch me, 
for the flowers are strong for that ; they talk to the 
angels in the night.” 

What use was it to argue with a little idiot like 
this ? Indeed, peasants never do argue ; they use 
abuse. 

It is their only form of logic. 

They used it to Bebee, rating her soundly, as be- 
came people who were old enough to be her grand- 
mothers, and who knew that she had been raked 
out of their own pond, and had no more real place 
in creation than a water-rat, as one might say. 

The women were kindly, and had never thrown 
this truth against her before, and in fact, to be a 
foundling was no sort of disgrace to their sight; 
but anger is like wine, and makes the depths of the 
mind shine clear, and all the mud that is in the 
depths stink in the light ; and in their wrath at not 
sharing Antoine’s legacy, the good souls said bitter 
things that in calm moments they would no more 
have uttered than they would have taken up a knife 
to slit her throat. 

They talked themselves hoarse with impatience 
and chagrin, and went backwards over the thresh- 


20 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


old, their wooden shoes and their shrill voices keep- 
ing a clattering chorus. By this time it was even- 
ing ; the sun had gone off the floor, and the bird 
had done singing. 

Bebee stood in the same place, hardening, her 
little heart, whilst big and bitter tears swelled into 
her eyes, and fell on the soft fur of the sleeping cat. 

She only very vaguely understood why it was in 
any sense shameful to have been raked out of the 
water-lilies like a drowning fleld-mouse, as they had 
said it was. 

She and Antoine had often talked of that summer 
morning when he had found her there among the 
leaves, and Bebee and he had laughed over it gayly, 
and she had been quite proud in her innocent 
fashion that she had had a fairy and the flowers for 
her mother and godmothers, which Antoine always 
told her was the case beyond any inanner of doubt. 
Even Father Francis, hearing the pretty harmless 
fiction, had never deemed it his duty to disturb 
her pleasure in it, being a good, cheerful old man, 
who thought that woe and wisdom both come soon 
enough to bow young shoulders and to silver young 
curls without his interference. 

Bebee had always thought it quite a fine thing to 
have been born of water-lilies, with the sun for her 
father, and when people in Brussels had asked her 
of her parentage, seeing her stand in the market 
with a certain look on her that was not like other 
children, had always gravely answered in the purest 
good faith, — 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


21 


‘‘ My mother was a flower.” 

“You are a flower, at any rate,” they would say 
in return ; and Bebee had been always quite con- 
tent. 

But now she was doubtful ; she was rather per- 
plexed than sorrowful. 

These good friends of hers seemed to see some 
new sin about her. Perhaps, after all, thought 
Bebee, it might have been better to have had a 
human mother who would have taken care of her 
now that old Antoine was dead, instead of those 
beautiful, gleaming, cold water-lilies which went to 
sleep on their green velvet beds, and did not cer- 
tainly care when the thorns ran into her fingers, or 
the pebbles got in her wooden shoes. 

In some vague way, disgrace and envy — the twin 
Discords of the world — touched her innocent cheek 
with their hot breath, and as the evening fell, Bebee 
felt very lonely and a little wistful. 

She had been always used to run out in the 
pleasant twilight-time among the flowers and 
water them, Antoine filling the can from the well; 
and the neighbors would come and lean against 
the little low wall, knitting and gossiping; and 
the big dogs, released from harness, would poke 
their heads through the wicket for a crust ; and the 
children would dance and play Colin Maillard on 
the green by the water, and she, when the flowers 
were no longer thirsted, would join them, and romp 
and dance and sing the gayest of them all. 

But now the buckets hung at the bottom of the 


22 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and the 
neighbors held aloof, and she shut-to the hut door 
and listened to the rain which began to fall, and 
cried herself to sleep all alone in her tiny kingdom. 

When the dawn came the sun rose red and 
warm ; the grass and boughs sparkled ; a lark 
sang ; Bebee awoke sad in heart, indeed, for her 
lost old friend, but brighter and braver. 

“ Each of them wants to get something out of 
me,*’ thought the child. “ Well, I will live alone, 
then, and do my duty, just as he said. The flowers 
will never let any real harm come, though they do 
look so indifierent and smiling sometimes, and 
though not one of them hung their heads when his 
coffin was carried through them yesterday.** 

That want of sympathy in the flowers troubled 
her. 

The old man had loved them so well ; and they 
had all looked as glad as ever, and had laughed 
saucily in the sun, and not even a rosebud turned 
the paler as the poor still stifiened limbs went by 
in the wooden shell. 

“I suppose G-od cares — ^but I wish they did,’* 
said Bebee, to whom the garden was more intelli- 
gible than Providence. 

“ Why do you not care?’* she asked the pinks, 
shaking the rain-drops oflT their curled rosy petals. 

The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and 
seemed to say, “ Why should we care for anything, 
unless a slug be eating us ? — that is real woe, if 
you like.** 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 23 

Bebee, without her sabots on, wandered thought- 
fully among the sweet wet sunlightened labyrinths 
of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the 
narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their cool- 
ness. 

“ He was so good to you,” she said reproachfully 
to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the painted 
sweet-peas. “He never let you know heat or 
cold — he never let the worm gnaw or the snail 
harm you ; — he would get up in the dark to see 
after your wants, — and when the ice froze over 
you, he was there to loosen your chains. Why do 
you not care, any one of you?” 

“How silly you are!” said the flowers. “You 
must be a butterfly or a poet, Bebee, to be as fool- 
ish as that. Some one will do all he did. We are 
of market value, you know. Care, indeed ! — when 
the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in 
the place to trouble us.” 

The flowers were not always so selfish as this ; 
and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee’s heart made 
their callousness seem harder than it really was. 

When we suffer very much ourselves, anything 
that smiles in the sun seems cruel — a child, a bird, 
a dragon-ffy — nay, even a ffuttering ribbon, or a 
spear-grass that waves in the wind. 

There was a little shrine at the corner of the 
garden, set into the wall ; a niche with a bit of 
glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that 
no one could trace any feature of it. 

It had been there for centuries, and was held in 


24 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


great veneration ; and old Antoine had always cut 
the choicest buds of his roses and set them in a 
delf pot in front of it every other morning all the 
summer long. Bebee, whose religion was the 
sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Chris- 
tian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints 
was exactly equal in strength and in ignorance — 
Bebee filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt 
down on the turf in that little green corner, and 
prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to 
the awful unknown Powers who were to her only 
as gentle guides and kindly playmates. 

Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother? 

She was almost fearful that she was ; but then 
the Holy Mother loved flowers so well, Bebee 
would not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid. 

‘‘ When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and 
tries to be good, and never tells a lie,” thought 
Bebee, “I am quite sure, as she loves the lilies, 
that she will never altogether forget me.” 

So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, and 
nothing doubting ; and then rose for her daily work 
of cutting the flowers for the market in Brussels. 

By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, 
her goat foddered, her starling’s cage cleaned, her 
hut door locked, and her wooden shoes clatter- 
ing on the sunny road into the city, Bebee was 
almost content again, though ever and again, as she 
trod the familiar ways, the tears dimmed her eyes 
as she remembered that old Antoine would never 
again hobble over the stones beside her. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 25 

“You are a little willful one, and too young to 
Ave alone,” said Father Francis, meeting her in 
the lane. 

But he did not scold her seriously; and she kept 
to her resolve ; and the women, who were good at 
heart, took her back into favor again; and so 
Bebee had her own way, and the fairies, or the 
saints, or both together, took care of her ; and so 
it came to pass that all alone she heard the cock 
crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand 
and amazing truth that this warm, fragrant, dusky 
June morning found her full sixteen years old. 



CHAPTEE 11. 

two years had not been all playtime 
7 more than they had been all summer. 
tVhen one has not father, or mother, or 
brother, and all one’s friends have barely bread 
enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, 
nor its crusts very many at any time. 

Bebee had a cherub’s mouth, and a dreamer’s 
eyes, and a poet’s thoughts sometimes in her own 
untaught and unconscious fashion. 

But all the same she was a little hard-working 
Brabant peasant girl ; up whilst the birds twittered 
in the dark ; to bed when the red sun sank beyond 
the far blue line of the plains ; she hoed, and dug, 
and watered, and planted her little plot; she kept 
her cabin as clean as a fresh-blossomed primrose ; 
she milked her goat, and swept her floor ; she sat, 
all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, 
and in the winter-time, when her garden yielded 
her nothing, she strained her sight over lace-making 
in the city to get the small bit of food that stood 
between her and that hunger which to the poor 
means death. 

A hard life : very hard when hail and snow made 
26 



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


27 


the streets of Brussels like slopes of ice ; a little hard 
even in the gay summer-time when she sat under 
the awning fronting the Maison du Roi ; but all the 
time the child throve on it, and was happy, and 
dreamed of many graceful and gracious things 
whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing 
the threads to and fro on her lace pillow. 

Now — when she woke to the full sense of her 
wonderful sixteen years — ^Bebee, standing barefoot 
on the mud-floor, was as pretty a sight as was to be 
seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine. 

The sun had only left a soft warmth like an 
apricot’s on her white skin. Her limbs, though 
strong as a mountain pony’s, were slender and well 
shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, 
and tumbled about her shoulders. Her pretty 
round plump little breast was white as the lilies in 
the grass without, and in this blooming time of her 
little life Bebee, in her way, was beautiful as a 
peach-bloom is beautiful, and her innocent, coura- 
geous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath 
their laughter — dreams that went farther than the 
green woods of Laeken, farther even than the white 
clouds of summer. 

She could not move among them idly as poets 
and girls love to do ; she had to be active amidst 
them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail, 
and blight and frost would have made havoc ol 
their fairest hopes. 

The loveliest love is that which dreams high 
above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens ; but per- 


28 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


haps the strongest love is that which, whilst it 
adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its 
brow in heat, for the thing beloved. 

So Bebee dreamed in her garden ; but all the time 
for sake of it hoed and dug, and hurt her hands, 
and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders under 
the great metal pails from the well. 

This wondrous morning, with the bright burden 
of her sixteen years upon her, she dressed herself 
quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a bird, 
went to sit on her little wooden stool in the door- 
way. 

There had been fresh rain in the night: the gar- 
den was radiant; the smell of the wet earth was 
sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in 
palaces. 

The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair 
as she went out; the starling called to her — 
“ Bebee, Bebee — bonjour, bonjour.’’ These were all 
the words it knew. It said the same words a thou- 
sand times a week. But to Bebee it seemed that 
the starling most certainly knew that she was six- 
teen years old that day. 

Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in 
the dawn and thought, without knowing that she 
thought it, “ How good it is to live when one is 
young !” 

Old people say the same thing often, but they 
sigh when they say it. Bebee smiled. 

Mere Krebs opened her door in the next cottage^ 
and nodded over the wall. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


29 


“ What a fine thing to be sixteen ! — a merry 
year, Bebee.’’ 

Marthe, the carpenter’s wife, came out from her 
gate, broom in hand. 

“ The Holy Saints keep you, Bebee ; why, you 
are quite a woman now !” 

The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal* 
burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the old 
churches, rushed out of their little home up the 
lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar 
and seeds, and tied round with a blue ribbon, that 
their mother had made that very week, all in her 
honor. 

“ Only see, Bebee ! Such a grand cake !” they 
shouted, dancing down the lane. “Jules picked 
the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and 
Christine took the ribbon off her own communion 
cap — all for you — all for you ; but you will let us 
come and eat it too ?” 

Old gran’m^re Bishot, who was the oldest 
woman about Laeken, hobbled through the grass 
on her crutches and nodded her white shaking 
head, and smiled at Bebee. 

“ I have nothing to give you, little one — except 
my blessing, if you care for that.’^ 

Bebee ran out, breaking from the children, and 
knelt down in the wet grass, and bent her pretty 
sunny head to the benediction. 

Trine, the miller’s wife, the richest woman of 
them all, called to the child from the steps of the 
mill, — 

3 * 


30 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


‘‘A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, 
Bebee! Come up, and here is my first dish of 
cherries for you ; not tasted one myself ; they will 
make you a feast with Varnhart’s cake, though 
she should have known better, so poor as she is. 
Charity begins at home, and these children’s 
stomachs are empty. 

Bebee ran up and then down again gleefully, 
with her lapful of big black cherries ; Tambour, 
the old white dog, who had used to drag her about 
in his milk-cart, leaping on her in sympathy and 
congratulation. 

“ What a supper we will have !” she cried to the 
charcoal-burner’s children, who were turning sum- 
mersaults in the dock-leaves, while the swans stared 
and hissed. 

When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have 
a flavor of Paradise still, especially when they are 
tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year. 

An old man called to her as she went by his 
door. All these little cabins lie close together, 
with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or 
their hedges of thorn between them; you may 
ride by and never notice them if yoil do not look 
for them under the leaves closely, as you would 
for thrushes’-nests. 

He, too, was very old ; a life-long neighbor and 
gossip of Antoine’s; he had been a day-laborer 
in these same fields all his years, and had never 
traveled farther than where the red mill-sails 
turned among the colza and the corn. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 3I 

Come in, my pretty one, for a second,” he 
whispered, with an air of mystery that made 
Bebee’s heart quicken with expectancy. ‘‘ Come 
in; I have something for you. They were my 
dead daughter’s — you have heard me talk of her 
— Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they 
say ; for me I think it was yesterday. M^re Krebs 
• —she is a hard woman — heard me talking of my 
girl. She burst out laughing, ‘ Lord’s sake, fool, 
why, your girl would be sixty now an she had 
lived.’ Well, so it may be; you see, the new mill 
was put up the week she died, and you call the 
new mill old ; but, my girl, she is young to me. 
Always young. Come here, Bebee.” 

Bebee went after him, a little awed, into the 
dusky interior, that smelt of stored apples and of 
dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was 
a wal nut-wood press, such as the peasants of 
France and the low countries keep their home- 
spun linen in and their old lace that serves for the 
nuptials and baptisms of half a score of genera- 
tions. 

The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand, 
and there came from it an odor of dead lavender 
and of withered rose-leaves. 

On the shelves there were a girl’s set of clothes, 
and a girl’s sabots, and a girl’s communion veil 
and wreath. 

“ They are all hers,” he whispered ; “ all hers. 
And sometimes in the evening-time I see her com- 
ing along the lane for them — do you not know ? 


82 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


There is nothing changed ; nothing changed ; the 
grass, and the trees, and the huts, and the pond 
are all here — why should she only be gone 
away ?” 

“ Antoine is gone.” 

Yes. But he was old ; my girl is young.” 

He stood a moment, with the press door open, 
a perplexed trouble in his dim eyes; the divine 
faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of ignor- 
ance made him cling to this one thought without 
power of judgment in it. 

“ They say she would be sixty,” he said, with a 
little dreary smile. “ But that is absurd, you 
know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she 
would run — no lapwing could fly faster over corn. 
These are her things, you see ; yes — all of them. 
That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her 
belt the day before the wagon knocked her down 
and killed her. I have never touched the things. 
But look here, Bebee, you are a good child and 
true, and like her just a little. I mean to give 
you her silver clasps. They were her great- 
great-great-grandmother’s before her. God knows 
how old they are not. And a girl should have 
some little wealth of that sort — and for Antoine’s 
sake ” 

The old man stayed behind, closing the press 
door upon the lavender-scented clothes, and sitting 
down in the dull shadow of the hut to think of his 
daughter, dead forty summers and more. 

Bebee went out with the brave broad silver 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 33 

clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on her 
cheeks for a grief not her own. 

To be killed just when one was young, and was 
loved like that, and all the world was in its May- 
day flower ! The silver felt cold to her touch — as 
cold as though it were the dead girl’s hands that 
held her. 

The garlands that the children strung of daisies 
and hung about her had never chilled her so. 

But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal- 
burner’s little tribe, running to meet her, screamed 
with glee, and danced in the gay morning. 

“ Oh, Bebee ! how you glitter ! Did the Virgin 
send you that off her own altar? Let me see — 
let me touch ! Is it made of the stars or of the 
sun ?” 

And Bebee danced with the child, and the silver 
gleamed and sparkled, and all the people came 
running out to see, and the milk-carts were half 
an hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud 
unfed, and the men even stopped on their way to 
the flelds and paused, with their scythes on their 
shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift. 

“ There is not such another set of clasps in 
Brabant ; old work you could make a fortune of 
in the curiosity-shops in the Montagne,” said 
Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her mill-house. 
‘‘ But, all the same, you know, Bebee, things eft’ a 
dead body bring mischance sometimes.” 

But Bebee danced with the child, and did not 
hear. 


0 


34 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Whose fete day had ever begun like this one of 
hers? 

She was a little poet at heart, and should not 
have cared for such vanities; but when one is 
only sixteen, and has only a little rough woolen 
frock, and sits in the market-place or the lace- 
room, with other girls around, how should one be 
altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, beauti- 
ful shield of silver that sparkled with each step 
one took? 

A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, 
that Bebee or her friends could spare at five o’clock 
on a summer morning, when the city was waiting 
for its eggs, its honey, its fiowers, its cream, and 
its butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather 
harness in impatience to be off with his milk-cans. 

So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and heroine 
though she felt herself, ran in-doors, put up her 
cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of 
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick 
and happy little feet along the grassy paths toward 
the city. 

The sorting and tying up of the fiowers she 
always left until she was sitting under the awning 
in front of the Broodhuis ; the same awning, tawny 
s an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old 
sail, which had served to shelter Antoine Maes 
from heat and rain through all the years of his 
life. 

“Go to the Madeleine; you will make money 
\here, with your pretty blue eyes, Bebee,” people 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 35 

had said to her of late ; but Bebee had shaken her 
head. 

Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine’s 
feet, she would sit so long as she sold flowers in 
Brussels — here, underneath the shadow of the 
Gothic towers that saw Egmont die. 

Old Antoine had never gone into the grand 
market that is fashioned after the Madeleine of 
Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling 
halls, all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bou- 
quets fit for the bridal of Una, and large as the 
shield of the Red-Cross Knight. 

Antoine could not compete with all those treas- 
ures of greenhouse and stove. He had always had 
his little stall among those which spread their 
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms 
under the shadow of the Hotel de Ville, in the 
midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and 
the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, 
the mountebank, and the marriage-parties, that 
daily and hourly throng the Grande Place. 

Here Bebee, from three years old, had been 
used to sit beside him. By nature she was as gay 
as a lark. The people always heard her singing as 
they passed the garden. The children never found 
their games so merry as when she danced their 
rounds with them ; and though she dreamed so 
much out there in the air among the carnations 
and the roses, or in the long, low work-room in the 
town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the 
cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were 


86 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


all bright of hue and sunny in their phantasies. 
Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire: she 
wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing. 

She did not care for the grand gay people. 

When the band played, and the park filled, and 
the bright little cafes were thronged with pleasure- 
seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and thither 
to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the 
guinguettes, Bebee, going gravely along with her 
emptied baskets homeward, envied none of these. 

When at Noel the little children hugged their 
loads of puppets and sugar-plums; when at the 
Fete Bieu the whole people flocked out be-rib- 
boned and vari-colored like any bed of spring-ane- 
mones; when in the merry midsummer the chars- 
^-bancs trundled away into the forest with laugh- 
ing loads of students and maidens ; when in the 
rough winters the carriages left furred and jeweled 
women at the doors of the operas or the palaces — 
Bebee, going and coming through the city to her 
flower-stall or lace-work, looked at them all, and 
never thought of envy or desire. 

She had her little hut; she could get her bread ; 
she lived with the flowers ; the neighbors were good 
to her, and now and then, on a saint’s day, she too 
got her day in the woods ; it never occurred to her 
that her lot could be better. 

But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old 
beauty of the Broodhuis, or at the wondrous carven 
fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the painted 
stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


37 


colors of the shipping on the quay, or at the long 
dark aisles of trees that went away through the 
forest, where her steps had never wandered — some- 
times Bebee would get pondering on all this un- 
known world that lay before and behind and around 
her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would 
steal on her; and she would say to herself, ‘‘If 
only I knew a little — just a very little !” 

But it is not easy to know even a very little when 
you have to work for your bread from sunrise to 
nightfall, and when none of your friends know how 
to read or write, and even your old priest is one 
of a family of peasants, and can just teach you the 
alphabet, and that is all. For Father Francis could 
do no more than this ; and all his spare time was 
taken up in digging his cabbage-plot and seeing to 
his beehives ; and the only books that Bebee ever 
beheld were a few tattered lives of saints that lay 
moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage. 

But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or 
rather that are quaint, touching, illuminated le- 
gends of the Middle Ages, which those who run 
may read. 

Brussels is a gay little city, that lies as bright 
within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that 
rests upon moss. 

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks 
itself with white and gold. It has music under its 
trees and soldiers in its streets, and troops march- 
ing and countermarching along its sunny avenues. 
It has blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its 
4 


88 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


awnings and on its house-fronts. It has a merry 
open-air life on its pavements at little marble tables 
before little gay-colored cafes. It has gilded bal- 
conies, and tossing flags, and comic operas, and 
leisurely pleasure-seekers, and tries always to be- 
lieve and make the world believe that it is Paris 
in very truth. 

But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and 
the foreigners. 

There is a Brussels that is better than this — a 
Brussels that belongs to the old burgber-life, to the 
artists and the craftsmen, to the master-masons of 
the Moyen-%e, to the same spirit and soul that once 
filled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of 
Bruges and the besieged of Leyden, and the blood 
of Egmont and of Horne. 

Down there by the water-side, where the old 
quaint walls lean over the yellow sluggish stream, 
and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges swing 
against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges. 

In the gray square desolate courts of the old pal- 
aces, where in cobwebbed galleries and silent cham- 
bers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces. 

In the great populous square, where, above the 
clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic front 
of the Maison du Hoi frowns against the sun, and 
the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster’s 
gathering-halls tower into the sky in all the fantas- 
tic luxuriance of Gothic fancy. 

Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the 
stillness of the cathedral, across whose sunny aisles 


TTFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


39 


some little child goes slowly all alone, laden with 
lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their 
white glory hides its curly head. 

In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn 
from men in silent grass-grown corners, where a 
twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses, or a 
Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool-warehouse, or a 
water-spout with a grinning faun’s head laughs in 
the grim humor of the Moyen-^e above the bent 
head of a young lace-worker. 

In all these, Brussels, though more worldly than 
her sisters of Ghent and Bruges, and far more 
worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg 
and Niirnberg, is still in her own way like as a 
monkish story mixed up with the Romaunt of the 
Rose; or rather like some gay French vaudeville, 
all fashion and jest, illustrated in old Missal man- 
ner with helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, pray- 
ing knights and fighting priests, winged griffins 
and nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and 
enamored princes, all mingled together in the 
illuminated colors and the heroical grotesque ro- 
mance of the Middle Ages. 

And it was this side of the city that Bebee 
knew ; and she loved it well, and would not leave 
it for the market of the Madeleine. 

She had no one to tell her anything, and all 
Antoine had ever been able to say to her concern- 
ing the Broodhuis was that it had been there in 
his father’s time ; and regarding St. Gudule, that 
his mother had burned many a candle before its 


40 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


altars for a dead brother who had been drowned 
off the dunes. 

But the child’s mind, unled, but not misled, had 
pondered on these things, and her heart had grown 
to love them ; and perhaps no student of Spanish 
architecture, no antiquary of Moyen4ge relics, 
loved St. Gudule and the Broodhuis as little 
ignorant Bebee did. 

There had been a time when great dark, fierce 
men had builded these things, and made the place 
beautiful. So much she knew ; and the little wist- 
ful, untaught brain tried to project itself into those 
unknown times, and failed, and yet found pleasure 
in the efibrt. And Bebee would say to herself as 
she walked the streets, “ Perhaps some one will 
come some day who will tell me all those things.” 

Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she was 
quite content. 

Besides, she knew all the people : the old cob- 
bler, who sat next her, and chattered all day long 
like a magpie ; the tinker, who had come up many 
a summer night to drink a glass with Antoine; 
the Cheap John, who cheated everybody else, but 
who had always given her a toy or a trinket at 
every Fete Dieu all the summers she had known ; 
the little old woman, sour as a crab, who sold 
rosaries and pictures of saints, and little waxen 
Christs upon a tray ; the big dogs who pulled the 
carts in, and lay panting all day under the rush- 
bottomed chairs on which the egg- wives and the 
fruit-sellers sat, and knitted, and chaffered; nay. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


41 


even the gorgeous huissier and the frowning gen- 
darme, who marshaled the folks into order as 
they went up for municipal registries, or for town- 
misdemeanors. She knew them all; had known 
them all ever since she had first trotted in like a 
little dog at Antoine’s heels. 

So Bebee stayed there. 

It is, perhaps, the moet beautiful square in all 
Northern Europe, with its black timbers and gilded 
carvings, and blazoned windows, and majestic 
scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. That Bebee 
did not know, but she loved it, and she sat reso- 
lutely in front of the Broodhuis, selling her flowers, 
smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting 
her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday 
like any other market-girl, but at times glancing 
up to the stately towers and the blue sky, with a 
look on her face that made the old tinker and 
cobbler whisper together, “What does she see 
there ? — the dead people or the angels ?” 

The truth was that even Bebee herself did not 
know very surely what she saw — something that 
was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd 
that loved her. That was all she could have said 
had anybody asked her. 

But none did. 

No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and 
for the angels, the tinker and the cobbler were of 
opinion that one had only too much of them sculp- 
tured about everywhere, and shining on all the 
casements — in reverence be it spoken, of course. 

4 * 



CHAPTER III. 


REMEMBERED it was your name-day, 
j ^ child. Here are half a dozen eggs,” 
said one of the hen-wives ; and the little 
cross woman with the peddler’s tray added a waxen 
St. Agnes, colored red and yellow to the very life 
no doubt ; and the old Cheap John had saved her 
a cage for the starling ; and the tinker had a cream- 
cheese for her in a vine-leaf, and the sweetmeat- 
seller brought her a beautiful gilded horn of sugar- 
plums, and the cobbler had made her actually a 
pair of shoes — red shoes, beautiful shoes to go to 
mass in and be a wonder in to all the neighbor- 
hood. And they thronged round her, and adored 
the silver waist - buckles ; and when Bebee got 
fairly to her stall, and traffic began, she thought 
once more that nobody’s feast-day had ever 
dawned like hers. 

When the chimes began to ring all over the city, 
she could hardly believe that the carillon was not 
saying its “ Laus Deo” with some special meaning 
in its bells of her. 

The morning went by as usual ; the noise of the 
throngs about her like a driving of angry winds, 
but no more hurting her than the angels on the 
42 




TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 43 

roof of St. Gudule are hurt by the storm when it 
breaks. 

Hard words, fierce passions, low thoughts, evil 
deeds, passed by the child without resting on her ; 
her heart was in her fiowers, and was like one of 
them with the dew of daybreak on it. 

There were many strangers in the city, and such 
are always sure to loiter in the Spanish square ; 
and she sold fast and well her lilacs and her roses, 
and her knots of thyme and sweet-brier. 

She was always a little sorry to see them go, her 
kindly pretty playmates that, nine times out of ten 
no doubt, only drooped and died in the hands that 
purchased them, as human souls soil and shrivel 
in the grasp of the passions that woo them. 

The day was a busy one, and brought in good 
profit. Bebee had no less than fifty sous in her 
leather pouch when it was over, — a sum of magni- 
tude in the green lane by Laeken. 

A few of her moss-roses were still unsold, that 
was all, when the Ave Maria began ringing over 
the town and the people dispersed to their homes 
or their pleasuring. 

It was a warm gray evening : the streets were 
full ; there were blossoms in all the balconies, and 
gay colors in all the dresses. The old tinker put 
his tools together, and whispered to her, — 

“ Bebee, as it is your feast-day, come and stroll 
in St. Hubert’s gallery, and I will buy you a little 
gilt heart, or a sugar-apple stick, or a ribbon, and 
we can see the puppet-show afterwards, eh 


44 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


But the children were waiting at home: she 
would not spend the evening in the city ; she only 
thought she would just kneel a moment in the 
cathedral and say a little prayer or two for a 
minute — the saints were so good in giving her so 
many friends. 

There is something very touching in the Flemish 
peasant’s relation with his Deity. It is all very vague 
to him : a jumble of veneration and familiarity, of 
sanctity and profanity, without any thought of 
being familiar, or any idea of being profane. 

There is a homely poetry, an innocent affection- 
ateness in it, characteristic of the people. He talks 
to his good angel Michel, and to his friend that 
dear little Jesus, much as he would talk to the 
shoemaker over the way or the cooper’s child in 
the doorway. 

It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of 
religion, this theology in wooden shoes ; it is half 
grotesque, half pathetic ; the grandmothers pass it 
on to the grandchildren as they pass the bowl of 
potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights ; 
it is as silly as possible, but it comforts them as 
they carry fagots over the frozen canals or wear 
their eyes blind over the squares of lace; and it 
has in it the supreme pathos of any perfect confi- 
dence, of any utterly childlike and undoubting 
trust. 

This had been taught to Bebee, and she went to 
sleep every night in the firm belief that the sixteen 
little angels of the Flemish prayer kept watch and 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


45 


ward over her bed. For the rest, being poetical, 
as these north folks are not, and having in her — 
wherever it came from, poor little soul — a warmth 
of fancy and a spirituality of vision not at all 
northern, she had mixed up her religion with the 
fairies of Antoine’s stories, and the demons in 
which the Flemish folks are profound believers, 
and the flowers into which she put all manner of 
sentient life, until her religion was a fantastic 
medley, so entangled that poor Father Francis 
had given up in despair any attempt to arrange it 
more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry 
himself, he was not so very full sure in his own 
mind that demons were not bodily presences, quite 
as real and often much more tangible than saints. 
Anyway, he let her alone ; and she believed in the 
goodness of God as she believed in the shining of 
the sun. 

People looked after her as she went through the 
twisting, picture-like streets, where sunlight fell 
still between the peaked high roofs, and lamps 
were here and there lit in the bric-a-brac shops 
and the fruit-stalls. 

Her little muslin cap blew back like the wings 
of a white butterfly. Her sunny hair caught the 
last sun-rays. Her feet were fair in the brown 
wooden shoes. Under the short woolen skirts 
the grace of her pretty limbs moved freely. Her 
broad silver clasps shone like a shield, and she was 
utterly unconscious that any one looked ; she was 
simply and gravely intent on reaching St. Gudule 


46 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


to say her one prayer and not keep the children 
waiting. 

Some one leaning idly over a balcony in the street 
that is named after Mary of Burgundy saw her going 
thus. He left the balcony and went down his stairs 
and followed her. 

The sun-dazzle on the silver had first caught his 
sight ; and then he had looked downward at the 
pretty feet. 

These are the chances women call Fate. 

Bebee entered the cathedral. It was quite empty. 
Far away at the west end there was an old custodian 
asleep on a bench, and a woman kneeling. That 
was all. 

Bebee made her salutations to the high altar, and 
stole on into the chapel of the Saint Sa-crament ; it 
was that one that she loved best. 

She said her prayer, and thanked the saints for 
all their gifts and goodness, her clasped hand against 
her silver shield, her basket on the pavement by 
her, abovehead the sunset rays streaming purple 
and crimson and golden through the painted win- 
dows that are the wonder of the world. 

When her prayer was done she still kneeled 
there ; her head thrown back to watch the light, 
her hands clasped still, and on her upturned face 
the look that made the people say, “ What does she 
see ? — the angels or the dead ?” 

She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries 
at home, and the children even. She was looking 
upward at the stories of the painted panes ; she was 



When her prayer was done, she still kneeled. 


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TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


47 


listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she 
was feeling vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the ten- 
der beauty of the sacred place and the awful won- 
der of the world in which she with her sixteen years 
was all alone, like a little blue corn-flower among 
the wheat that goes for grist and the barley that 
makes men drunk. 

For she was alone, though she had so many 
friends. Quite alone sometimes ; for God had been 
cruel to her, and had made her a lark without song. 

When the sun faded and the beautiful casements 
lost all glow and meaning, Behee rose with a startled 
look — had she been dreaming? — was it night? — 
would the children be sorry, and go supperless to 
bed? 

“ Have you a rosebud left to sell to me ?” a man’s 
voice said not far oflt’ ; it was low and sweet, as be- 
came the Sacrament Chapel. 

Bebee looked up ; she did not quite know what 
she saw : only dark eyes smiling into hers. 

By the instinct of habit she sought in her basket 
and found three moss-roses. She held them out 
to him. 

“ I do not sell flowers here, but I will give them 
to you,’' she said, in her pretty grave childish 
fashion. 

‘‘ I often want flowers,” said the stranger, as he 
took the buds. “ Where do you sell yours ? — in 
the market ?” 

“In the Grande Place.” 

“ Will you tell me your name, pretty one ?” 


48 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ I am Bebee.” 

There were people coming into the church. The 
bells were booming abovehead for vespers. There 
was a shuffle of chairs and a stir of feet. Boys in 
white went to and fro, lighting the candles. Great 
clouds of shadow drifted up into the roof and hid 
the angels. 

She nodded her little head to him. 

“ Good-night ; I cannot stay. I have a cake at 
home to-night, and the children are waiting.” 

‘‘ Ah ! that is important, no doubt, indeed. Will 
you buy some more cakes for the children from 
me ?” 

He slid a gold piece in her hand. She looked at 
it in amaze. In the green lanes by Laeken no one 
ever saw gold. Then she gave it him back. 

“ I will not take money in church, nor anywhere, 
except what the flowers are worth. Good-night.” 

He followed her, and held back the heavy oak 
door for her, and went out into the air with her. 

It was dark already, but in the square there was 
still the cool bright primrose-colored evening light. 

Bebee’s wooden shoes went pattering down the 
sloping and uneven stones. Her little gray flgure 
ran quickly through the deep shade cast from the 
towers and walls. Her dreams had drifted away. 
She was thinking of the children and the cake. 

“ You are in such a hurry because of the cake 
said her new customer, as he followed her. 

Bebee looked back at him with a smile in her 
blue eyes. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


49 


“ Yes — they will be waiting, you know, and there 
are cherries too/’ 

“ It is a grand day with you, then ?” 

“ It is my fete day : I am sixteen.” 

She was proud of this. She told it to the very 
dogs in the street. 

“ Ah ! — ^you feel old, I dare say ?” 

“ Oh, quite old ! They cannot call me a child 
any more.” 

“ Of course not ; it would be ridiculous. Are 
those presents in your basket 

“Yes, every one of them.” She paused a mo- 
ment to lift the dead vine-leaves, and show him the 
beautiful shining red shoes. “ Look ! — old Grin- 
goire gave me these. I shall wear them at mass 
next Sunday. I never had a pair of shoes in my 
life.” 

“But how will you wear shoes without stock- 
ings ?” 

It was a snake cast into her Eden. 

She had never thought of it. 

“ Perhaps I can save money and buy some,” she 
answered, after a sad little pause. “But that I 
could not do till next year. They would cost sev- 
eral francs, I suppose.” 

“ Unless a good fairy gives them to you ?” 

Bebee smiled ; fairies were real things to her— ~ 
relations indeed. She did not imagine that he 
spoke in jest. 

“ Sometimes I pray very much and things come,” 
she said softly. “ When the Gloire de Dijon was cut 
5 D 


50 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


back too soon one summer, and never blossomed, 
and we all thought it was dead, I prayed all day 
long for it, and never thought of anything else ; 
and by autumn it was all in new leaf, and now its 
flowers are flner than ever.” 

“ But you watered it whilst you prayed, I sup- 
pose ?” 

The sarcasm escaped her. 

She was wondering to herself whether it would 
be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of stockings : 
she thought she would go and ask Father Francis. 

By this time they were in the Rue Royale, and 
half-way down it. The lamps were lighted. A 
regiment was marching up it with a band playing. 
The windows were open, and people were laughing 
and singing in some of them. The light caught 
the white and gilded fronts of the houses. The 
pleasure-seeking crowds loitered along in the 
warmth of the evening. 

Bebee, suddenly roused from her thoughts by the 
loud challenge of the military music, looked round 
on the stranger, and motioned him back. 

“Sir, — I do not know you, — why should you 
come with me? Bo not do it, please. You make 
me talk, and that makes me late.” 

And she pushed her basket farther on her arm, 
and nodded to him, and ran off’— as fleetly as a hare 
through fern — among the press of the people. 

“ To-morrow, little one,” he answered her with 
a careless smile, and let her go unpursued. Above, 
from the open casement of a cafe, some young men 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 51 

and some painted women leaned out, and threw 
sweetmeats at him, as in carnival-time. 

“A new model, — that pretty peasant?” they 
asked him. 

He laughed in answer, and went up the steps to 
join them ; he dropped the moss-roses as he went, 
and trod on them, and did not wait. 



CHAPTER IV. 


l^S^EBEE ran home as fast as her feet would 

The children were all gathered about 
her gate in the dusky dewy evening ; they met her 
with shouts of welcome and reproach intermin- 
gled; they had been watching for her since first 
the sun had grown low and red, and now the moon 
was risen. 

But they forgave her when they saw the splen- 
dor of her presents, and she showered out among 
them Pere Melchior’s horn of comfits. 

They dashed into the hut ; they dragged the one 
little table out among the flowers; the cherries 
and cake were spread on it ; and the miller’s wife 
had given a big jug of milk, and Father Francis 
himself had sent some honeycomb. 

The early roses were full of scent in the dew ; 
the great gillyflowers breathed out fragrance in 
the dusk; the goat came and nibbled the sweet- 
brier unrebuked ; the children repeated the Flem- 
ish bread-grace, with clasped hands and reverent 
eyes — “ Oh, dear little Jesus, come and sup with 
us, and bring your beautiful Mother too ; we will 
62 



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 53 

not forget you are God.’’ Then, that said, they ate, 
and drank, and laughed, and picked cherries from 
each other’s mouths like little blackbirds ; the big 
white dog gnawed a crust at their feet ; old Krebs, 
who had a fiddle, and could play it, came out and 
trilled them rude and ready Flemish tunes, such 
as Teniers or Mieris might have jumped to before 
an ale-house at the Kermesse ; Bebee and the chil- 
dren joined hands, and danced round togetherinthe 
broad white moonlight, on the grass by the water- 
side; the idlers came and sat about, the women 
netting or spinning, and the men smoking a pipe 
before bed-time ; the rough hearty Flemish bub- 
bled like a brook in gossip, or rung like a horn 
over a jest; Bebee and the children, tired of their 
play, grew quiet, and chanted together the ‘‘ Ave 
Maria Stella Yirginis;” a nightingale among the 
willows sang to the sleeping swans. 

All was happy, quiet, homely ; lovely also in its 
simple way. 

They went early to their beds, as people must 
do who rise at dawn. 

Bebee leaned out a moment from her own little 
casement ere she too went to rest. 

Through an open lattice there sounded the mur- 
mur of some little child’s prayer ; the wind sighed 
among the willows; the nightingales sang on in 
the dark — all was still. 

Hard work awaited her on the morrow, and on 
all the other days of the year. 

She was only a little peasant, — she must sweep, 
5 * 


64 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


and spin, and dig, and delve, to get daily her bit 
of black bread, — but that night she was as happy 
as a little princess in a fairy tale; happy in her 
playmates, in her flowers, in her sixteen years, in 
her red shoes, in her silver buckles, because she 
was half a woman ; happy in the dewy leaves, in 
the singing birds, in the hush of the night, in the 
sense of rest, in the fragrance of flowers, in the 
drifting changes of moon and cloud; happy be- 
cause she was half a woman, because she was half 
a poet, because she was wholly a poet. 

Oh, dear swans, how good it is to be sixteen ! 
— ^how good it is to live at all ! — do you not tell 
the willows so ?” said Bebee to the gleam of silver 
under the dark leaves by the water’s side, which 
showed her where her friends were sleeping, with 
their snowy wings closed over their stately heads, 
and the veiled gold and ruby of their eyes. 

The swans did not awake to answer. 

Only the nightingale answered from the willows, 
with Desdemona’s song. 

But Bebee had never heard of Desdemona, and 
the willows had no sigh for her. 

“ Good-night !” she said, softly, to all the green 
dewy sleeping world, and then she lay down and 
slept herself. — The nightingale sang on, and the 
willows trembled. 



CHAPTER Y. 



F I could save a centime a day, I could 
buy a pair of stockings this time next 
year,’' thought Behee, locking her shoes 
with her other treasures in her drawer the next 
morning, and taking her broom and pail to wash 
down her little palace. 

But a centime a day is a great deal in Brabant, 
when one has not always enough for bare bread, 
and when, in the long chill winter, one must weave 
thread lace all through the short daylight for next 
to nothing at all ; for there are so many women in 
Brabant, and every one of them, young or old, can 
make lace, and if one do not like the pitiful wage, 
one may leave it and go and die, for what the mas- 
ter lace-makers care or know; there will always 
be enough, many more than enough, to twist the 
thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal 
veils, and the trains for the courts. 

“And besides, if I can save a centime, the Yarn- 
hart children ought to have it,” thought Bebee, as 
she swept the dust together. It was so selfish of 
her to be dreaming about a pair of stockings, when 
those little things often went for days on a stew of 
nettles. 


66 


66 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


So she looked at her own pretty feet, — pretty, 
and slender, and arched, rosy, and fair, and un- 
cramped by the pressure of leather, — and resigned 
her day-dream with a brave heart, as she put up 
her broom and went out to weed, and hoe, and 
trim, and prune the garden that had been for once 
neglected the night before. 

“ One could not move half so easily in stockings,” 
she thought with true philosophy as she worked 
among the black fresh sweet-smelling mould, and 
kissed a rose now and then as she passed one. 

When she got into the city that day, her rush- 
bottomed chair, which was always left upside down 
in case rain should fall in the night, was set ready 
for her, and on its seat was a gay, gilded box, such 
as rich people give away full of bonbons. 

Bebee stood and looked from the box to the 
Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box; she 
glanced around, but no one had come there so 
early as she, except the tinker, who was busy 
quarreling with his wife and letting his smelting 
fire burn a hole in his breeches. 

“ The box was certainly for her, since it was set 
upon her chair?” — Bebee pondered a moment; 
then little by little opened the lid. 

Within, on a nest of rose-satin, were two pair 
of silk stockings ! — Keal silk ! — with the prettiest 
clocks worked up their sides in color ! 

Bebee gave a little scream, and stood still, the 
blood hot in her cheeks; no one heard her, the 
tinker’s wife, who alone was near, having just 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


57 


wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, 
was busy putting out his smoking small-clothes. 
It is a way that women and wives have, and they 
never see the bathos of it. 

The Place filled gradually. 

The customary crowds gathered. The business 
of the day began underneath the multitudinous 
tones of the chiming bells. Bebee’s business 
began too ; she put the box behind her with a 
beating heart, and tied up her fiowers. 

It was the fairies, of course ! — but they had never 
set a rush-bottomed chair on its legs before, and 
this action of theirs frightened her. 

It was rather an empty morning. She sold 
little, and there was the more time to think. 

About an hour after noon, a voice addressed 
her, — 

“ Have you more moss-roses for me ?” 

Bebee looked up with a smile, and found some. 
It was her companion of the cathedral. She had 
thought much of the red shoes and the silver 
clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of 
him. 

“You are not too proud to be paid to-day?’’ he 
said, giving her a silver franc — he would not alarm 
her with any more gold ; she thanked him, and 
slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on 
sorting some clove-pinks. 

‘‘You do not seem to remember me?” he said, 
with a little sadness. 

“ Oh, I remember you,” said Bebee, lifting her 


68 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


fmiik eyes. “ Bat you know I speak to so many 
people, and they are all nothing to me.” 

“ Who is anything to you ?” It was softly and 
insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo. 

“Varnhart’s children,” she answered him, in- 
stantly. ‘‘ And old Annemie by the wharfside — and 
Tambour — and Antoine’s grave — and the starling 
— and, of course, above all, the flowers.” 

“And the fairies, I suppose? — though they do 
nothing for you.” 

She looked at him eagerly, — 

“ They have done something to-day. I have 
found a box, and some stockings — such beautiful 
stockings ! Silk ones ! Is it not very odd ?” 

“ It is more odd they should have forgotten you 
so long. May I see them ?” 

“ I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies 
are going to buy. But you can see them later — if 
you wait.” 

“ I will wait and paint the Broodhuis.” 

“ So many people do that ; you are a painter 
then ?” 

“ Yes — in a way.” 

He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread 
nis things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic 
went on around them. He was very many years 
older than she; handsome, with a dark, and 
changeful, and listless face ; he wore brown velvet, 
and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a 
little as Egmont might have done when wooing 
Claire. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


59 


Bebee, as she sold the flowers and took the 
change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him 
now and then, and watched the movements of his 
hands — she could not have told why. 

Always among men and women, always in the 
crowds of the streets, people were nothing to her ; 
she went through them as through a field of stand- 
ing corn, — only in the field she would have tarried 
for poppies, and in the town she tarried for no one. 

She dealt with men as with women, simply, 
truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness 
of a child. When they told her she was pretty, 
she smiled ; it was just as they said that her flowers 
were sweet. 

But this man’s hands moved so swiftly ; and as 
she saw her Broodhuis growing into color and 
form beneath them she could not choose but look 
now and then, and twice she gave her change 
wrong. 

He spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and 
on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and 
massive richness of the Maison du Boi. 

There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it 
will not find leisure to stare. The Fleming or the 
Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman’s courtesy; 
he is rough and rude ; he remains a peasant even 
when town-bred, and the surly insolence of the 
‘‘ Gueux” is in him still. He is kindly to his fel- 
lOws, though not to beasts ; he is shrewd, patient, 
thrifty, industrious, and good in very many ways, 
but civil never. 


60 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


A good score of them left off their occupatioDS 
and clustered round the painter, staring, chattering, 
pushing, pointing, as though a brush had never 
been seen in all the land of Rubens. 

Bebee, ashamed of her people, got up from her 
chair and rebuked them. 

“ Oh, men of Brussels ; tie then for shame !” she 
called to them as clearly as a robin sings. “Did 
never you see a drawing before ? and are there not 
saints and martyrs enough to look at in the galler- 
ies ? — and have you never some better thing to do 
than to gape wide-mouthed at a stranger ? What 
laziness — ah! just worthy of a people who sleep 
and smoke while their dogs work for them ! Go 
away, all of you ; look, there comes the gendarme 
— it will be the worse for you. Sir, sit under my 
stall ; they will not dare trouble you then.” 

He moved under the awning, thanking her with 
a smile ; and the people, laughing, shuffled unwill- 
ingly aside and let him paint on in peace. It was 
only little Bebee, but they had spoilt the child from 
her infancy, and were used to obey her. 

The painter took a long time. He set about it 
with the bold ease of one used to all the intricacies 
of form and color, and he had the skill of a master. 
But he spent more than half the time looking idly 
at the humors of the populace or watching how 
the treasures of Bebee’s garden went away one by 
one in the hands of strangers. 

Meanwhile, ever and again, sitting on the edge 
of her stall, with his colors and brushes tossed out 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 61 

on the board, he talked to her, and, with the soft 
imperceptible skill of long practice in those arts, 
he drew out the details of her little simple life. 

There were not always people to buy, and whilst 
she rested and sheltered the flowers from the sun 
she answered him willingly, and in one of her 
longer rests showed him the wonderful stockings. 

“Do you think it could be the fairies ?” she asked 
him a little doubtfully. 

It was easy to make her believe any fantastical 
nonsense; but her fairies were ethereal divinities. 
She could scarcely believe that they had laid that 
box on her chair. 

“Impossible to doubt it!” he replied, unhesita- 
tingly. “ Given a belief in fairies at all, why 
should there be any limit to what they can do? 
It is the same with the saints, is it not?” 

“ Yes,” said Bebee, thoughtfully. 

The saints were mixed up in her imagination 
with the fairies in an intricacy that would have 
defied the best reasonings of Father Francis. 

“Well, then, you will wear the stockings, will 
you not ? Only, believe me, your feet are far prettier 
without them.” 

Bebee laughed happily, and took another peep 
in the cosy rose-satin nest. But her little face 
had a certain perplexity. Suddenly she turned on 
him. 

“ Did not you put them there ?” 

“I? — never !” 

“ Are you quite sure ?” 


62 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ Quite ; but why ask ?” 

“Because,” said Bebee, shutting the box reso- 
lutely and pushing it a little away, “ because I 
would not take it if you did. You are a stranger, 
and a present is a debt, so Antoine always said.” 

“ Why take a present then from the Yarnhart 
children, or your old friend who gave you the 
clasps ?” 

“Ah, that is very different. When people are 
very, very poor, equally poor, the one with the 
other, little presents that they save for and make 
with such a difficulty are just things that are a 
pleasure; sacrifices; like your sitting up with a 
sick person at night, and then she sits up with you 
another year when you want it. Do you not 
know?” 

“ I know you talk very prettily. But why 
should you not take any one else’s present, though 
he may not be poor?” 

“ Because I could not return it.” 

“ Could you not ?” 

The smile in his eyes dazzled her a little ; it was 
so strange, and yet had so much light in it ; but 
she did not understand him one whit. 

“ Ko ; how could I ?” she said, earnestly. “ If 
I were to save for two years, I could not get francs 
enough to buy anything worth giving back ; and 
I should be so unhappy, thinking of the debt of it 
always. Do tell me if you put those stockings 
there ?” 

“No;” he looked at her, and the trivial lie 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


63 


faltered and died away ; the eyes, clear as crystal, 
questioned him so innocently. 

Well, if I did ?” he said, frankly, “ you wished 
for them ; what harm was there ? Will you be so 
cruel as to refuse them from me 

The tears sprang into Bebee’s eyes. She was 
sorry to lose the beautiful box, but more sorry he 
had lied to her. 

“ It was very kind and good,” she said, regret- 
fully. “ But I cannot think why you should have 
done it, as you had never known me at all. And, 
indeed, I could not take them, because Antoine 
would not let me if he were alive ; and if I gave 
you a flower every day all the year round I should 
not pay you the worth of them — it would be quite 
impossible ; and why should you tell me falsehoods 
about such a thing ? A falsehood is never a thing 
for a man.” 

She shut the box and pushed it towards him, 
and turned to the selling of her bouquets. Her 
voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch of 
mignonette and told the price of it. 

Those beautiful stockings ! why had she ever 
seen them, and why had he told her a lie ? 

It made her heart heavy. For the flrst time in 
her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown be- 
tween her and the sun. 

Undisturbed, he painted on and did not look at 
her. 

The day was nearly done. The people began to 
scatter. The shadows grew very long. He painted, 


64 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

not glancing once elsewhere than at his study. 
Bebee’s baskets were quite empty. 

She rose, and lingered, and regarded him wist- 
fully: he was angered; perhaps she had been 
rude ? Her little heart failed her. 

If he would only look up ! — 

But he did not look up ; he kept his handsome 
dark face studiously over the canvas of the Brood- 
huis. She would have seen a smile in his eyes if 
he had lifted them ; but he never raised his lids. 

Bebee hesitated : take the stockings she would 
not ; but perhaps she had refused them too roughly. 
She wished so that he would look up and save her 
speaking first; but he knew what he was about 
too warily and well to help her thus. 

She waited awhile, then took one little red moss- 
rosebud that she had saved all day in a corner of 
her basket, and held it out to him frankly, shyly, 
as a peace-ofiering. 

“ Was I rude ? I did not mean to be. But I 
cannot take the stockings ; and why did you tell 
me that falsehood 

He took the rosebud and rose too, and smiled ; 
but he did not meet her eyes. 

“ Let us forget the whole matter ; it is not worth 
a sou. If you do not take the box, leave it ; it is 
of no use to me.” 

“ I cannot take it.” 

She knew she was doing right. How was it that 
he could make her feel as though she were acting 
wrongly ? 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 05 

“Leave it then, I say. You are not the first 
woman, my dear, who has quarreled with a wish 
fulfilled. It is a way your sex has of rewarding 
gods and men. Here, you old witch — here is a 
treasure-trove for you. You can sell it for ten 
francs in the town anywhere.” 

As he spoke he tossed the casket and the stock* 
ings in it to an old decrepit woman, who was pass- 
ing by with a baker’s cart drawn by a dog ; and, 
not staying to heed her astonishment, gathered his 
colors and easel together. 

The tears swam in Bebee’s eyes as she saw the 
box whirled through the air. 

She had done right — she was sure she had done 
right. 

He was a stranger, and she could never have 
repaid him ; but he made her feel herself wayward 
and ungrateful, and it was hard to see the beauti- 
ful fairy gift borne away forever by the chuckling, 
hobbling, greedy old baker’s woman. If he had 
only taken it himself, she would have been glad 
then to have been brave and to have done her 
duty. 

But it was not in his design that she should be 
glad. 

He saw her tears, but he seemed not to see them. 

“ Good-night, Bebee,” he said carelessly, as he 
sauntered aside from her. “ Good-night, my dear. 
To-morrow I will finish my painting; but I will 
not offend you by any more gifts.” 

Bebee lifted her drooped head, and looked him 

6^^ E 


66 


TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


in the eyes eagerly, with a certain sturdy resolve 
and timid wistfulness intermingled in her look. 

“Sir, — see, you speak to me quite wrongly,” 
she said with a quick accent, that had pride as 
well as pain in it. “ Say it was kind to bring me 
what I wished for — yes, it was kind, I know ; but 
you never saw me till last night, and I cannot tell 
even your name ; and it is very wrong to lie to any 
one, even to a little thing like me ; and I am only 
Bebee, and cannot give you anything back, because 
I have only just enough to feed myself and the star- 
ling, and not always that in winter. I thank you 
very much for what you wished to do ; but if I had 
taken those things, I think you would have thought 
me very mean and full of greed; and Antoine 
always said, ‘ Do not take what you cannot pay — 
not ever what you cannot pay — that is the way to 
walk with pure feet.’ Perhaps I spoke ill, be- 
cause they spoil me, and they say I am too swift 
to say my mind. But I am not thankless — not 
thankless, indeed — it is only I could not take what 
I cannot pay. That is all. You are angry still — 
not now — no ?” 

There was anxiety in the pleading. What did 
it matter to her what a stranger thought ? 

And yet Bebee’s heart was heavy as he laughed 
a little coldly, and bade her good-day, and left her 
alone to go out of the city homewards. A sense 
of having done wrong weighed on her ; of having 
been rude and ungrateful. 

She had no heart for the children that evening. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


67 


Mere Krebs was sitting out before her door shelling 
peas, and called to her to come in and have a drop 
of coffee. Krebs had come in from Yilvdorde fair, 
and brought a stock of rare good berries with him. 
But Bebee thanked her, and went on to her own 
garden to work. 

She had always liked to sit out on the quaint 
wooden steps of the mill and under the red shadow 
of the sails, watching the swallows flutter to and 
fro in the sunset, and hearing the droll frogs croak 
in the rushes, while the old people told her tales 
of the time of how in their babyhood they had run 
out, fearful yet fascinated, to see the beautiful 
Scots Grays flash by in the murky night, and the 
endless line of guns and caissons crawl black as a 
snake through the summer dust and the trampled 
corn, going out past the woods to Waterloo. 

But to-night she had no fancy for it : she wanted 
to be alone with the flowers. 

Though, to be sure, they had been very heartless 
when Antoine’s coffin had gone past them, still 
they had sympathy ; the daisies smiled at her with 
their golden eyes, and the roses dropped tears on 
her hand, just as her mood might be; the flowers 
were closer friends, after all, than any human souls ; 
and besides, she could say so much to them ! 

Flowers belong to fairy-land ; the flowers and the 
birds, and the butterflies, are all that the world 
has kept of its Golden Age; the only perfectly 
beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half- 
divine, useless, say they who are wiser than God. 


68 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Bebee went home and worked among her flowers. 

A little laborious figure, with her petticoats 
twisted high, and her feet wet with the night dews, 
and her back bowed to the hoeing and clipping 
and raking among the blossoming plants. 

‘‘ How late you are working to-night, Bebee 
one or two called out, as they passed the gate. 
She looked up and smiled ; but went on working 
while the white moon rose. 

She did not know what ailed her. 

She went to bed without supper, leaving her bit 
of bread and bowl of goat’s milk to make a meal 
for the fowls in the morning. 

‘‘Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!” she said 
to them, sitting on the edge of her mattress, and 
looking at them in the moonlight. They were 
very pretty feet, and would not have been half so 
pretty in silk hose and satin shoon ; but she did 
not know that : he had told her she wanted those 
vanities. 

She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying 
to and fro like two roses that grow on one stalk 
and hang down in the wind. The little lattice 
was open ; the sweet and dusky garden was be- 
yond ; there was a hand’s breadth of sky, in which 
a single star was shining ; the leaves of the vine 
hid all the rest. 

But for once she saw none of it. 

She only saw the black Broodhuis ; the red and 
gold sunset overhead; the gray stones, with the 
fallen rose-leaves and crushed fruits ; and in the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


69 


shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that looked 
at hers. 

Had she been ungrateful ? 

The little tender, honest heart of her waa 
troubled and oppressed. For once, that night sh« 
slept ill. 



CHAPTER YI. 

at under the yellow 
Dne. 

; there were many 
strangers. Flowers were in demand. The copper 
pieces were ringing against one another all the 
hours through in her leathern hag. The cobbler 
was in such good humor that he forgot to quarrel 
with his wife. The fruit was in such plenty that 
they gave her a leaf-full of white and red currants 
for her noonday dinner. And the people split 
their sides at the Cheap John’s jokes ; he was so 
droll. Ho one saw the leaks in his kettles or the 
hole in his bellows, or the leg that was lacking to 
his milking-stool. 

Everybody was gay and merry that day. But 
Bebee’s blue eyes looked wistfully over the throng, 
and did not find what they sought. Somehow 
the day seemed dull, and the square empty. 

The stones and the timbers around seemed more 
than ever full of a thousand stories that they would 
not tell her because she knew nothing, and was 
only Bebee. 

She had never known a dull hour before. She^ 
70 


LL the next day she g 
awning, but she sat al 
It was market-day 





TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


71 


a little bright, industrious, gay thing, whose hands 
were always full of work, and whose head was 
always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter- 
time, when she wove the lace in the gray, chilly 
work-room, with the frost on the casements, and 
the mice running out in their hunger over the bare 
brick floor. 

That bare room was a sad enough place some- 
times, when the old women would bewail how 
they starved on the pittance they gained, and the 
young women sighed for their aching heads and 
their failing eyesight, and the children dropped 
great tears on the bobbins, because they had come 
. out without a crust to break their fast. 

She had been sad there often for others, but she 
had never been dull — not with this unfamiliar, 
desolate, dreary dullness, that seemed to take all 
the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all 
the color out of the blue sky above. Why, she had 
no idea herself. She wondered if she were going 
to be ill ; she had never been ill in her life, being 
strong as a little bird that has never known cage 
or captivity. 

When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick 
sigh as she looked across the square. She had so 
wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful ; and 
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of 
sweet-brier, and a tiny spray of maiden-hair fern 
that grew under the willows, which she had kept 
covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day 
long. 


72 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


No one would have it now. 

The child went out of the place sadly, as the 
carillon rang. There was only the moss-rose in 
her basket, and the red and white currants that 
had been given her for her dinner. 

She went along the twisting, many-colored, 
quaintly-fashioned streets, till she came to the 
water-side. 

It is very ancient there still ; there are all man- 
ner of old buildings, black and brown and gray, 
peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors, crum- 
bling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the 
dark surface of the canal, dusky wharves crowded 
with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and timber, and 
all' the various freightage that the good ships come 
and go with all the year round, to and from the 
Zuyder-Zee, ‘ and the Baltic water, and the wild 
Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish 
headlands, and the pretty gray Norman seaports, 
and the white sandy dunes of Holland, with the 
toy towns and the straight poplar-trees. 

Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and barges, 
that looked so big to her, with their national flags 
flying, and their tall masts standing thick as grass, 
and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and 
about them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, 
unknown thing, the sea. 

Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; some • 
times some old salt, sitting astride of a cask, would 
tell her a mariner’s tale of far-away lands and mys- 
teries of the deep; sometimes some ciirly-headed 



A mariner’s tale of far-away lands and mysteries of the deep. 



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TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


73 


cabin-boy would give her a shell or a plume of 
sea-weed, and try and make her understand what 
the wonderful wild water was like, which was not 
quiet and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, 
but was forever changing and moving, and curling 
and leaping, and making itself now blue as her 
eyes, now black as that thunder-cloud, now white 
as the snow that the winter wind tossed, now pearl- 
hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in 
her own garden. 

And Bebee would listen, with the shell in her 
lap, and try to understand, and gaze at the ships 
and then at the sky beyond them, and try to figure 
to herself those strange countries to which these 
ships were always going, and saw in fancy all the 
blossoming orchard province of green France, and 
all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the 
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, 
many lands that had no place at all except in 
dream-land, and were more beautiful even than the 
beauty of the earth, as poets’ countries are, to their 
own sorrow oftentimes. 

But this dull day Bebee did not go down upon 
the wharf ; she did not want the sailors’ tales ; she 
saw the masts and the bits of bunting that streamed 
from them, and they made her restless, which they 
had never done before. 

Instead she went in at a dark old door and 
climbed up a steep staircase that went up and up, 
as though she were mounting St. Gudule’s belfry 
towers ; and at the top of it entered a little chamber 
7 


74 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


ill the roof, where one square unglazed hole that 
served for light looked out upon the canal, with all 
its crowded craft, from the dainty schooner-yacht, 
fresh as gilding and holy-stone could make her, 
that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the 
rude, clumsy coal-barge, black as night, that bore 
the rough diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried 
roofs of Christiania and Stromstad. 

In the little dark attic there was a very old 
woman in a red petticoat and a high cap, who sat 
against the window, and pricked out lace patterns 
with a pin, on thick paper. She was eighty-five 
years old, and could hardly keep body and soul 
together. 

Bebee, running to her, kissed her. 

“ Oh, mother Annemie, look here ! Beautiful 
red and white currants, and a roll ; I saved them 
for you. They are the first currants we have seen 
this year. Me ? oh, for me, I have eaten more than 
are good ! You know I pick fruit like a sparrow, 
always. Bear mother Annemie, are you better? 
Are you quite sure you are better to-day ?” 

The little old withered woman, brown as a wal- 
nut and meagre as a rush, took the currants, and 
smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat them, 
blessing the child with each crumb she broke off 
the bread. 

“ Why had you not a grandmother of your own, 
my little one?” she mumbled. “How good you 
would have been to her, Bebee !” 

“ Yes,” said Bebee seriously, but her mind could 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


75 


not grasp the idea. It was easier for her to believe 
the fanciful lily-parentage of Antoine’s stories. 
“ How much work have you done, Annemie ? Oh, 
all that ? all that ? But there is enough for a week. 
You work too early and too late, you dear Anne- 
mie.” 

“ Hay, Bebee, when one has to get one’s bread 
that cannot be. But I am afraid my eyes are fail- 
ing. That rose now, is it well done ?” 

“ Beautifully done. Would the Baes take them 
if they were not ? You know he is one that cuts 
every centime in four pieces.” 

“ Ah ! sharp enough, sharp enough — that is true. 
But I am always afraid of my eyes. I do not see 
the flags out there so well as I used to do.” 

“ Because the sun is so bright, Annemie ; that is 
all. .1 myself, when I have been sitting all day in 
the Place in the light, the flowers look pale to me. 
And you know it is not age with me, Annemie ?” 

The old woman and the young girl laughed to- 
gether at that droll idea. 

“You have a merry heart, dear little one,” 
said old Annemie. “ The saints keep it to you 
always.” 

“ May I tidy the room a little ?” 

“ To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I have 
not much time, you see ; and somehow my back 
aches badly when I stoop.” 

“ And it is so damp here for you, over all that 
water !” said Bebee as she swept and dusted and 
set to rights the tiny place, and put in a little 


76 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 


broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle and rose- 
mary that she had brought with her. ‘‘It is so 
damp here. You should have come and lived in 
my hut with me, Annemie, and sat out under the 
vine all day, and looked after the chickens for me 
when I was in the town. They are such mis- 
chievous little souls ; as soon as my back is turned 
one or other is sure to push through the roof, and 
get out among the flowerbeds. Will you never 
change your mind, and live with me, Annemie? 
I am sure you would be happy, and the starling 
says your name quite plain, and he is such a funny 
bird to talk to ; you never would tire of him. Will 
you never come ? It is so bright there, and green 
and sweet-smelling ; and to think you never even 
have seen it! — and the swans and all, — it is a 
shame.” 

“ No, dear,” said old Annemie, eating her last 
bunch of currants. “ You have said so so often, 
and you are good and mean it, that I know. But 
I could not leave the water. It would kill me. 
Out of this window you know I saw my Jeannot’s 
brig go away — away — away — till the masts were 
lost in the mists. Going with iron to Norway ; the 
Fleur d’Epine of this town, a good ship, and a sure, 
and her mate ; and as proud as might be, and with 
a little blest Mary in lead round his throat. She 
was to be back in port in eight months, bringing 
timber. Eight months — that brought Easter-time. 
But she never came. Never, never, never, you 
know. I sat here watching them come and go. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


77 


and my child sickened and died, and the summer 
passed, and the autumn, and all the while I looked 
— looked — looked ; for the brigs are all much alike ; 
and only her I always saw as soon as she hove in 
sight (because he tied a hank of flax to her mizzen 
mast) ; and when he was home safe and sound I 
spun the hank into hose for him ; that was a fancy 
of his, and for eleven voyages, one on another, he 
had never missed to tie the flax nor I to spin the 
hose. But the hank of flax I never saw this time ; 
nor the brave brig; nor my good man with his 
sunny blue eyes. Only one day in winter, when 
the great blocks of ice were smashing hither and 
thither, a coaster came in and brought tidings of 
how ofi* in the Danish waters they had come on a 
waterlogged brig, and had boarded her, and had 
found her empty, and her hull riven in two, and 
her crew all drowned and dead beyond any manner 
of doubt. And on her ^tern there was her name 
painted white, the Fleur d’Epine, of Brussels, as 
plain as name could be ; and that was all we ever 
knew: what evil had struck her, or how they 
had perished, nobody ever told. Only the coaster 
brought that bit of beam away, with the Fleur 
d’Epine writ clear upon it. But you see I never know 
my man is dead. Any day — who can say ? — any 
one of those ships may bring him aboard of her, 
and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come 
running up the stairs as he used to do, and cry, in 
his merry voice, ‘ Annemie, Annemie, here is more 
flax to spin, here is more hose to weave!’ For 
I* 


78 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


that was always his homeward word; no matter 
whether he had had fair weather or foul, he always 
knotted the flax to his masthead. So you see, 
dear, I could not leave here. For what if he came 
and found me away ? He would say it was an odd 
fashion of mourning for him. And I could not do 
without the window, you know. I can watch all 
the brigs come in ; and I can smell the shipping 
smell that I have loved all the days of my life ; and 
I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and furl- 
ing, and mending their hits of canvas, and hauling 
their flags up and down. And then who can say ? 
— the sea never took him, I think — I think I shall 
hear his voice before I die. For they do say that 
God is good.” 

Bebee, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and 
her eyes grew wistful and wondering. She had 
heard the story a thousand times ; always in diflfer- 
ent words, but always the same little tale, and she 
knew how old Annemie was deaf to all the bells 
that tolled the time, and blind to all the whiteness 
of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and 
only thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been 
in the days of her youth. 

But this afternoon the familiar history had a 
new patheticalness for her, and as the old soul put 
aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas that 
screened the casement, and looked out, with her 
old dim sad eyes strained in the longing that God 
never answered, Bebee felt a strange chill at her 
own heart, and wondered to herself, — 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


79 


“ What can it be to care for another creature 
like that? It must be so terrible, and yet it must 
be beautiful too. Does every one suffer like that ?” 

She did not speak at all as she finished sweep- 
ing the bricks, and went down-stairs for a metal 
cruche full of water, and set over a little charcoal 
on the stove the old woman’s brass soup-kettle 
with her supper of stewing cabbage. 

Annemie did not hear or notice ; she was still 
looking out of the hole in the wall on to the masts, 
and the sails, and the water. 

It was twilight. 

From the barges and brigs there came the smell 
of the sea. The sailors were shouting to each 
other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in 
the growing darkness. On the other side of the 
canal the belfries were ringing for vespers. 

“ Eleven voyages one and another, and he never 
forgot to tie the fiax to the mast,” Annemie mur- 
mured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out into 
the gray air. “It used to fly there, — one could see 
it coming up half a mile oft’, — just a pale-yellow 
flake on the wind, like a tress of my hair, he would 
say. ITo, no, I could not go away ; he may come 
to-night, to-morrow, any time ; he is not drowned, 
not my man ; he was all I had, and God is good, 
they say.” 

Bebee listened and looked; then kissed the old 
shaking hand and took up the lace patterns and 
went softly out of the room without speaking. 

When old Annemie watched at the window it 


80 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


was useless to seek for any word or sign of her ; 
people said that she had never been quite right in 
her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years 
before, when the coaster had brought into port the 
broken beam of the good brig Fleur d’Epine. 

Bebee did not know about that, nor heed whether 
her wits were right or not. 

She had known the old creature in the lace-room 
where Annemie pricked out designs, and she had 
conceived a great regard and sorrow for her ; and 
when Annemie had become too ailing and aged to 
go herself any longer to the lace-maker’s place, 
Bebee had begged leave for her to have the pat- 
terns at home, and had carried them to and fro for 
her for the last three or four years, doing many 
other little useful services for the lone old soul as 
well — services which Annemie hardly perceived, 
she had grown so used to them, and her feeble 
intelligence was so sunk in the one absorbing idea 
that she must watch all the days through and all 
the years through for the coming of the dead man 
and the lost brig. 

Bebee put the lace patterns in her basket, and 
trotted home, her sabots clattering on the stones. 

“ What is must be to care for any one like 
that!’* she thought, and by some vague associa- 
tion of thought that she could not have pursued, 
she lifted the leaves and looked at the moss-rose- 
bud. 

It was quite dead. 


CHAPTER VIL 



S she got clear of the city and out on her 
country road, a shadow fell across her in 
the evening light. 

“ Have you had a good day, little one ?” asked 
a voice that made her stop with a curious vague 
expectancy and pleasure. 

“ It is you she said, with a little cry, as she 
saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning on a 
gate midway in the green and solitary road that 
leads to Laeken. 

“ Yes, it is I,” he answered, as he joined her. 
“ Have you forgiven me, Bebee ?” 

She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes, 
like those of a child in fault. 

“ Oh, I did not sleep all night,’’ she said, simply. 
“ I thought I had been rude and ungrateful, and I 
could not be sure I had done right, though to have 
done otherwise would certainly have been wrong.” 

He laughed. 

“ Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be 
drawn from most moral uncertainties. Do not 
think twice about the matter, my dear. I have 
not, I assure you.” 



Y 


81 


82 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


« No 

She was a little disappointed. It seemed such 
an immense thing to her ; and she had lain awake 
all the night, turning it about in her little brain, 
and appealing vainly for help in it to the sixteen 
sleep-angels. 

!N’o, indeed. And where are you going so fast, 
as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of 
Mercury?” 

“ Mercury — is that a shoemaker ?” 

“No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of cobbling 
once, when he made Woman. ^ But he did not 
shoe her feet with swiftness that I know of ; she 
only runs away to be run after, and if you do not 
pursue her, she comes back — always.” 

Bebee did not understand at all. 

“ I thought God made women,” she said, a little 
awe-stricken. 

“ You call it God. People three thousand years 
ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both mean 
the same thing, — mere words to designate an 
unknown quality. Where are you going? Does 
your home lie here ?” 

“ Yes, onward, quite far onward,” said Bebee, 
wondering that he had forgotten all she had told 
him the day before about her hut, her garden, and 
her neighbors. “You did not come and finish your 
picture to-day : why was that ? I had a rosebud for 
you, but it is dead now.” 

“I went to Anvers. You looked for me a little, 
then ?” 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 83 

Oh, all day long. For I was so afraid I had 
been ungrateful.” 

“ That is very pretty of you. Women are never 
grateful, my dear, except when they are very ill- 
treated. Mercury, whom we were talking of, gave 
them, among other gifts, a dog’s heart.” 

Bebee felt bewildered ; she did not reason about 
it, but the idle, shallow, cynical tone, pained her 
by its levity and its unlikeness to the sweet, still, 
gray summer evening. 

“ Why are you in such a hurry ?” he pursued. 
“ The night is cool, and it is only seven o’clock. 
I will walk part of the way with you.” 

“ I am in a hurry because I have Annemie’s 
patterns to do,” said Bebee, glad that he spoke of 
a thing that she knew how to answer. ‘‘ You see, 
Annemie’s hand shakes and her eyes are dim, and 
she pricks the pattern all awry and never perceives 
it ; it would break her heart if one showed her so, 
but the Baes would not take them as they are; 
they are of no use at all. So I prick them out 
myself on fresh paper, and the Baes thinks it is all 
her doing, and pays her the same money, and she 
is quite content. And as I carry the patterns to 
and fro for her, because she cannot walk, it is easy 
to cheat her like that ; and it is no harm to cheat 
50, you know.” He was silent. 

“ You are a good little girl, Bebee, I can see,” 
he said at last, with a graver sound in his voice. 
“And who is this Annemie for whom you do so 
much — an old woman, I suppose?” 


84 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ Oh, yes, quite old ; incredibly old. Her man 
was drowned at sea sixty years ago, and she 
watches for his brig still, night and morning.’^ 

“ The dog’s heart. ITo doubt he beat her, and 
had a wife in fifty other ports.” 

“ Oh, no,” said Bebee, with a little cry, as 
though the word against the dead man hurt her. 
“ She has told me so much of him. He was as good 
as good could be, and loved her so, and between 
the voyages they were so happy. Surely that must 
have been sixty years now, and she is so sorry 
still, and still will not believe that he was drowned.” 

He looked down on her with a smile that had a 
certain pity in it. 

“ Well, yes ; there are women like that, I believe. 
But be very sure, my dear, he beat her. Of the 
two, one always holds the whip and uses it, — the 
other crouches.” 

“I do not understand,” said Bebee. 

“ No — but you will.” 

“ I will ? — when ?” 

He smiled again. 

“Oh — to-morrow, perhaps, or next year — or 
when Fate fancies.” 

“ Or rather — when I choose,” he thought to him- 
self, and let his eyes rest with a certain pleasure 
on the little feet, that went beside him in the grass, 
and the pretty fair bosom that showed ever and 
again, as the frills of her linen bodice were blown 
Dack by the wind and her own quick motion. 

Bebee looked also up at him ; he was very hand- 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


85 


some, and looked so to her, after the broad blunt 
characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry around 
her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad 
in picture-like velvets, he had a beautiful poetic 
head, and eyes like deep brown waters, and a face 
like one qf Jordaens’ or Rembrandt’s cavaliers in 
the galleries where she used to steal in of a Sun- 
day, and look up at the paintings, and dream of 
what that world could be in which those people 
had lived. 

“ You are of the people of Rubes’ country, are you 
not ?’’ she asked him. 

“ Of what country, my dear V* 

“ Of the people that live in the gold frames,” 
said Bebee, quite seriously. “ In the galleries, you 
know. I know a charwoman that scrubs the floors of 
the Arenberg Palace, and she lets me in sometimes 
to look ; and you are just like those great gentle- 
men in the gold frames, only you have not a hawk 
and a sword, and they always have. I used to 
wonder where they came from, for they are not 
like any of us one bit, and the charwoman — she is 
Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot 
d’Etain — always said, ‘ Dear heart, they all belong 
to Rubes’ land — we never see their like nowa- 
days.’ But you must come out of Rubes’ land ; at 
least, I think so, do you not ?” 

He caught her meaning ; he knew that Rubes was 
the homely abbreviation of Rubens that all the 
Hetherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that 
was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind. 

8 


86 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ Perhaps I do,” he answered her with a smile, 
for it was not worth his while to disabuse her 
thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to 
her. “ Do you not want to see Kubes’ world, little 
one ? To see the gold and the grandeur, and the 
glitter of it all ? — never to toil or get tired ? — always 
to move in a pageant? — always to live like the 
hawks in the paintings you talk of, with silver 
bells hung round you, and a hood all sewn with 
pearls?” 

“No,” said Bebee, simply. “I should like to 
see it— just to see it, as one looks through a grating 
into the king’s grape-houses here. But I should 
not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the star- 
ling, and the chickens, and what would the garden 
do without me ? — and the children, and the old 
Annemie ? I could not anyhow, anywhere, be any 
happier than I am. There is only one thing I 
wish.” 

“ And what is that ?” 

“ To know something ; not to be so ignorant. 
Just look — I can read a little, it is true : my Hours, 
and the letters, and when Krebs brings in a news- 
paper I can read a little of it — not much. I know 
French well, because Antoine was French himself, 
and never did talk Flemish to me ; and they being 
Netherlanders, cannot, of course, read the news- 
papers at all, and so think it very wonderful indeed' 
in me. But what I want is to know things, to 
know all about what was before ever I was living. 
St. Gudule now — they say it was built hundreds of 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


87 


years before ; and Rubes again — they say he was a 
painter-king in Antwerpen before the oldest oldest 
woman like Annemie ever began to count time. I 
am sure books tell you all those things, because I see 
the students coming and going with them ; and when 
I saw once the millions of books in the Rue du 
Musee, I asked the keeper what use they were for, 
and he said, ‘ To make men wise, my dear.’ But 
Gringoire Bac the cobbler, who was with me, — it 
was a f^te day, — Bac, he said, ‘ Do not you believe 
that, Bebee; they only muddle folk’s brains; for 
one book tells them one thing, and another book 
another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the 
contrary lying ; and if you see a bookish man, be 
sure you see a very poor creature who could not 
hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, 
were it ever so.’ But I do not believe that Bao 
said right. Did he ?” 

“ I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is the 
truest remark on literature I have ever heard, and 
one that shows great judgment in Bac. Well ?” 

‘‘ Well — sometimes, you know,” said Bebee, 
not understanding his answer, but pursuing her 
thoughts confidentially ; “ sometimes I talk like 
this to the neighbors, and they laugh at me. Be- 
cause M^re Krebs says that when one knows how 
to spin and sweep and make bread and say one’s 
prayers and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a woman 
wants to know this side of heaven. But for me, I 
cannot help it — when I look at those windows in 
the cathedral, or at those beautiful twisted little 


88 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Bpires that are all over our Hotel de Yille, I want 
to know who the men were that made them — what 
they did and thought — how they looked and 
spoke, — how they learned to shape stone into 
leaves and grasses like that — how they could im- 
agine all those angel faces on the glass. When I go 
alone in the quite early morning or at night when 
it is still — sometimes in winter I have to stay till 
it is dark over the lace — I hear their feet come 
after me, and they whisper to me close, ‘Look 
what beautiful things we have done, Bebee, and 
you all forget us quite. We did what never will 
die, but our names are as dead as the stones.’ 
And then I am so sorry for them and ashamed. 
And I want to know more. Can you tell me 

He looked at her earnestly ; her eyes were 
shining, her cheeks were warm, her little mouth 
was tremulous with eagerness. 

“ Did any one ever speak to you in that way ?” 
he asked her. 

“ Ho,” she answered him. “ It comes into my 
head of itself. Sometimes I think the cathedral 
angels put it there. For the angels must be tired, 
you know; always pointing to God and always 
seeing men turn away. I used to tell Antoine 
sometimes. But he used to shake his head and 
say that it was no use thinking ; most likely St. 
Gudule and St. Michael had set the church down 
in the night all ready-made, why not ? God made 
the trees, and they were more wonderful, he 
thought, for his part. And so perhaps they are. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


89 


but that is no answer. And I do want to know. 
I want some one who will tell me, — and if you 
come out of Rubes’ country as I think, no doubt 
you know every thing, or remember it ?” 

He smiled. 

“ The free pass to Rubes’ country lies in books, 
pretty one. Shall I give you some? — nay, lend 
them, I mean, since giving you are too willful to 
hear of without offense. You can read, you 
said ?” 

Bebee’s eyes glowed as they lifted themselves 
to his. 

“I can read — not very fast, but that would 
come with doing it more and more, I think, just 
as spinning does-— one knots the thread and breaks 
it a million times before one learns to spin as fine 
as cobwebs. I have read the stories of St. Anne, 
and of St. Catherine, and of St. Luven fifty times, 
but they are all the books that Father Francis has ; 
and no one else has any among us.” 

“Very well. You shall have books of mine. 
Easy ones first; and then those that are more 
serious. But what time will you have ? You do 
so much ; you are like a little golden bee.” 

Bebee laughed happily. 

“ Oh ! give me the books and I will find the 
time. It is light so early now. That gives one 
so many hours. In winter one has so few one 
must lie in bed, because to buy a candle you know 
one cannot afford except of course, a taper now 
and then, as one’s duty is, for our Lady or for 
8 * 


90 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


the dead. And will you really, really, lend me 
books ?” 

“ Eeally — I will. Yes. I will bring you one to 
the Grande Place to-morrow, or meet you on your 
road there with it. Do you know what poetry is, 
Beb6e?’^ 

‘‘ But your flowers talk to you ?” 

“ Ah ! always. But then no one else hears them 
ever but me ; and so no one else ever believes.” 

Well — ^poets are folks who hear the flowers talk 
as you do, and the trees, and the seas, and the 
beasts, and even the stones ; but no one else ever 
hears these things, and so, when the poets write 
them out, the rest of the world say, ‘ That is very 
fine, no doubt, but only good for dreamers ; it will 
bake no bread.’ I will give you some poetry — for 
I think you care more about dreams than about 
bread.” 

I do not know,” said Bebee ; and she did not 
know, for her dreams, like her youth and her inno- 
cence, and her simplicity, and her strength, were 
all unconscious of themselves, as such things must 
be to be pure and true at all. 

Bebee had grown up straight, and clean, and fra- 
grant, and joyous as one of her own carnations; 
but she knew herself no more than the carnation 
knows its color and its root. 

“]N’o, you do not know,” said he, with a sort of 
pity; and thought within himself, was it worth 
while to let her know ? 


TW:. LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 


91 


If she did not know, these vague aspirations and 
imaginations would drop off from her with the 
years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers drop 
downwards with the summer heats. She would 
forget them. They would linger a little in her 
head, and, perhaps, always wake at some sunset 
hour or some angelus chime, hut not to trouble her. 
Only to make her cradle-song a little sadder and 
softer than most women’s was. Unfed, they would 
sink away and hear no blossom. 

She would grow into a simple, hardy, hard-work- 
ing, God-fearing Flemish woman like the rest. 
She would marry, no doubt, some time, and rear 
her children honestly and well; and sit in the 
market-stall every day, and spin and sew, and dig 
and wash, and sweep, and brave bad weather, and 
be content with poor food to the end of her harm- 
less and laborious days — poor little Bebee ! 

He saw her so clearly as she would be — if he let 
her alone. 

A little taller, a little broader, a little browner, 
less sweet of voice, less soft of skin, less flower-like 
in face; having learned to think only as her neigh- 
bors thought, of price of wood and cost of bread ; 
laboring cheerily but hardly from daybreak to 
nightfall to All hungry mouths; forgetting all 
things except the little curly-heads clustered round 
her soup-pot, and the year-old lips sucking at her 
breasts. 

A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as clear 
as the dew-drop, and as colorless ; a life opening, 


92 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


passing, ending in the little green wooded lane, by 
the bit of water where the swans made their nests 
under the willows ; a life like the life of millions, 
a little purer, a little brighter, a little more tender, 
perhaps, than those lives usually are, but otherwise 
as like them as one ear of barley is like another as 
it rises from the soil, and blows in the wind, and 
turns brown in the strong summer sun, and then 
goes down to the sod again under the sickle. 

He saw her just as she would be — if he let her 
alone. 

But should he leave her alone ? 

He cared nothing; only her eyes had such a 
pretty, frank, innocent look like a bird’s in them, 
and she had been so brave and bold with him 
about those silken stockings ; and this little igno- 
rant, dreamful mind of hers was so like a blush 
rosebud, which looks so close-shut, and so sweet- 
smelling, and so tempting fold within fold, that a 
child will pull it open, forgetful that he will spoil 
it forever from being a full-grown rose, and that 
he will let the dust, and the sun, and the bee into 
its tender bosom — and men are true children, and 
women are their rosebuds. 

Thinking only of keeping well with this strange 
and beautiful wayfarer from that unknown paradise 
of Rubes’ country, Bebee lifted up the vine-leaves 
of her basket. 

“ I took a flower for you to-day, but it is dead. 
Look — to-morrow, if you will be there, you shall 
have the best in all the garden.” 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


93 


“ You wish to see me again then V he asked her. 
Bebee looked at him with troubled eyes, but with 
a sweet frank faith that had no hesitation in it. 

“ Yes ! you are not like anything I ever knew, 
and if you will only help me to learn a little. Some- 
times I think I am not stupid, only ignorant — ^but 
I cannot be sure unless I try.” 1 

He smiled ; he was listlessly amused ; the day be- 
fore he had tempted the child merely because she 
was pretty, and to tempt her in that way seemed 
the natural course of things, but now there was 
something in her that touched him differently ; the 
end would be the same, but he would change the 
means. 

The sun had set. There was a low, dull red glow 
still on the far edge of the plains — that was all. In 
the distant cottages little lights were twinkling. 
The path grew dark. 

“ I will go away and let her alone,” he thought. 
“ Poor little soul ! it would give itself lavishly, it 
would never be bought. I will let it alone ; the 
mind will go to sleep and the body will keep 
healthy and strong and pure, as people call it. It 
would be a pity to play with both a day, and then 
throw them away as the boy threw the pear-blossom. 
She is a little clod of earth that has field-flowers 
growing in it. I will let her alone, the flowers 
under the plow in due course will die, and she 
will be content among the other clods, — if I let 
her alone.” 

At that moment there went across the dark fields, 


94 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


against the dusky red sky, a young man with a pile 
of brushwood on his hack, and a hatchet in his 
hand. 

“ You are late, Bebee,” he called to her in Flem- 
ish, and scowled at the stranger by her side. 

“A good-looking lad — who is it?” said her com- 
panion. 

“ That is Jeannot, the son of old Sophie,” she 
answered him. “ He is so good — oh, so good, you 
cannot think ; he keeps his mother and three little 
sisters, and works so very, very hard in the forest, 
and yet he often finds time to dig my garden for 
me, and he chops all my wood in winter.” 

They had come to where the road goes up by 
the king’s summer-palace. They were under great 
hanging beeches and limes. There was a high 
gray wall, and over it the blossoming fruit-boughs 
hung. In a ditch full of long grass little kids 
bleated by their mothers. Away on the left went 
the green fields of colza, and beetroot, and trefoil, 
with big forest-trees here and there in their midst, 
and, against the blue low line of the far horizon, 
red mill-sails, and gray church spires; dreamy 
plaintive bells far away somewhere were ringing 
the sad, Flemish carillon. 

He paused and looked at her. 

“ I must hid you good-night, Bebee — ^you are 
near your home now.” 

She paused too and looked at him. 

“ But I shall see you to-morrow ?” 

There was the wistful, eager, anxious uiicon- 


Trro LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 95 

Bciousuess of appeal as when the night before she 
had asked him if he were angry. 

He hesitated a moment. If he said no, and 
went away out of the city wherever his listless and 
changeful whim called him, he knew how it would 
be with her; he knew what her life would be as 
surely as he knew the peach would come out of 
the peach-flower rosy on the wall there : life in the 
little hut ; among the neighbors ; sleepy and safe 
and soulless ; — if he let her alone. 

If he stayed and saw her on the morrow he knew, 
too, the end as surely as he knew that the branch 
of white pear-blossom which in carelessness he had 
knocked down with a stone on the grass yonder, 
would fade in the night and would never bring 
forth its sweet, simple fruit in the sunshine. 

To leave the peach-flower to come to maturity 
and be plucked by a peasant — or to pull down the 
pear-blossom and rifle the buds ? 

Carelessly and languidly he balanced the ques- 
tion with himself, whilst Bebee, forgetful of the 
lace patterns and the flight of the hours, stood 
looking at him with anxious and pleading eyes, 
thinking only — was he angry again, or would he 
really bring her the books and make her wise, and 
let her know the stories of the past ? 

‘‘ Shall I see you to-morrow she said wist- 
fully. 

Should she ? — if he left the peach-blossom safe 
on the wall, Jeannot the woodcutter would come 
b^-and-by and gather the fruit. 


96 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


If he left the clod of earth in its pasture with all 
its daisies untouched, this black-browed young 
peasant would cut it round with his hatchet and 
carry it to his wicker cage, that the homely brown 
lark of his love might sing to it some stupid wood 
note under a cottage eave. 

The sight of the strong young forester going 
over the darkened fields against the dull red skies 
was as a feather that suffices to sway to one side a 
balance that hangs on a hair. 

He had been inclined to leave her alone when 
he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless, 
honest life that her fanciful girlhood would settle 
down into as time should go on. But when in the 
figure of the woodman there was painted visibly 
on the dusky sky that end for her which he had 
foreseen, he was not indiflerent to it ; he resented 
it ; he was stirred to a vague desire to render it 
impossible. 

If Jeannot had not gone by across the fields he 
would have left her and let her alone from that 
night thenceforwards ; as it was, — 

“Good-night, Bebee,” he said to her. “To- 
morrow I will finish the Broodhuis and bring you 
your first book. Do not dream too much, or you 
will prick your lace patterns all awry. Good-night, 
pretty one.” 

Then he turned and went back through tho 
green dim lanes to the city. 

Bebee stood a moment looking after him, with 
a happy smile; then she picked up the fallen 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 97 

peach-bough, and ran home as fast as her feet 
would take her. 

That night she worked very late watering her 
flowers, and trimming them, and then ironing out 
a little clean white cap for the morrow ; and then 
sitting down under the open lattice to prick out all 
old Annemie’s designs by the strong light of the 
full moon that flooded her hut with its radiance. 

But she sang all the time she worked, and the 
gay, pretty, wordless songs floated across the 
water and across the fields, and woke some old 
people in their beds as they lay with their win- 
dows open, and they turned and crossed them- 
selves, and said, “ Dear heart ! — this is the Eve of 
the Ascension, and the angels are so near we hear 
them.” 

But it was no angel ; only the thing that is nearer 
heaven than anything else — a little hum'an heart 
that is happy and innocent. 

Bebee had only one sorrow that night. The 
peach-blossoms were all dead — and no care could 
call them back even for an hour’s blooming. 

“ He did not think when he struck them down,” 
she said to herself, regretfully. 


9 



CHAPTER YIIL 



j] AH I do any work for you, Bebee said 
black J cannot in the daybreak, pushing 
her gate open timidly with one hand. 

“There is none to do, Jeannot. They want so 
little in this time of the year — the flowers,^’ said 
she, lifting her head from the sweet-peas she was 
tying up to their sticks. 

The woodman did not answer; he leaned over 
the half-open wicket, and swayed it backwards 
and forwards under his bare arm. He was a good, 
harmless, gentle fellow, swarthy as charcoal and 
simple as a child, and quite ignorant; having spent 
all his days in the great Soignies forests making 
fagots when he was a little lad, and hewing down 
trees or burning charcoal as he grew to manhood. 

“Who was that seigneur with you last night, 
Bebee ?” he asked, after a long silence, watching 
her as she moved. 

Bebee’s eyes grew very soft, but they looked up 
frankly. 

“lam not sure — I think he is a painter — a great 
painter-prince, I mean — as Rubes was in Ant- 
98 



Looking round as she sat on the edge of the roof, with one foot 
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TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 99 

werpen ; he wanted roses the night before last in 
the cathedral.’’ 

“ But he was walking with you ?” 

“He was in the lane as I came home last night 
--yes.” 

“ What does he give you for your roses?” 

“ Oh — he pays me well. How is your mother 
this day, Jeannot ?” 

“ You do not like to talk of him ?” 

“ Why should you want to talk of him ? — he is 
nothing to you.” 

“Did you really see him only two days ago, 
B4b6e ?” 

“Oh, Jeannot! — did I ever tell a falsehood? — 
you would not say that to one of your little sisters.” 

The forester swayed the gate to and fro drearily 
under his folded arms. 

Bebee, not regarding him, cut her flowers, and 
filled her baskets, and did her other work, and set 
a ladder against the hut and climbed on its low 
roof to seek for eggs, the hens having green tastes 
sometimes for the rushes and lichens of its thatch. 
She found two eggs, which she promised herself 
to take to Annemie, and looking round as she sat 
on the edge of the roof, with one foot on the high- 
est rung of the ladder, saw that Jeannot was still 
at the gate. 

“You will be late in the forest, Jeannot,” she 
cried to him. “ It is such a long, long way in and 
out. Why do you look so sulky? and you are 
kicking the wicket to pieces.” 


100 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


I do not like you to talk with strangers,” said 
J eannot, sullenly and sadly. 

Bebee laughed as she sat on the edge of the 
thatch, and looked at the shining gray skies of the 
early day, and the dew-wet garden, and the green 
fields beyond, with happy eyes that made the 
familiar scene transfigured to her. 

“ Oh, Jeannot, what nonsense ! As if I do not 
talk to a million strangers every summer ! as if I 
could ever sell a fiower if I did not ! You are 
cross this morning — that is what it is.” 

“ Do you know the man’s name ?” said Jeannot, 
suddenly. 

Bebee felt her cheeks grow warm as with some 
noonday heat of sunshine. She thought it was 
with anger against blundering Jeannot’ s curiosity. 

“No! and what would his name be to us, if I 
did know it ? I cannot ask people’s names because 
they buy my roses.” 

“As if it were only roses! ” 

There was the length of the garden between 
them, and Bebee did not hear as she sat on the 
edge of her roof with that light dreamful enjoy- 
ment of air and sky and coolness, and all the 
beauty of the dawning day, which the sweet vague 
sense of a personal happiness will bring with it to 
the dullest and the coldest. 

“You are cross, Jeannot, that is what it is,” she 
said, after awhile. “You should not be cross; 
you are too big and strong and good. Gro in and 
get my bowl of bread and milk for me, and hand 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. IQl 

it to me up here. It is so pleasant. It is as nice 
as being perched on an apple-tree.” 

Jeannot went in obediently and handed up her 
breakfast to her, looking at her with shy, worship- 
ing eyes. But his face was overcast, and he sighed 
heavily as he took up his hatchet and turned away ; 
for he was the sole support of his mother and 
sisters, and if he did not do his work in Soignies 
they would starve at home. 

“You will be seeing that stranger again?” he 
asked her. 

“ Yes !” she answered, with a glad triumph in 
her eyes ; not thinking at all of him as she spoke. 
“You ought to go, Jeannot, now; you are so late. 
I will come and see your mother to-morrow. And 
do not be cross, you dear big Jeannot. Days are 
too short to snip them up into little bits by bad 
temper ; it is only a stupid sheep-shearer that spoils 
the fleece by snapping at it sharp and hard — that 
is what Father Francis says.” 

Bebee having delivered her little piece of wis- 
dom, broke her bread into her milk and ate it, lift- 
ing her face to the fresh wind and tossing crumbs 
to the wheeling swallows, and watching the rose- 
bushes nod and toss below in the breeze, and think- 
ing vaguely how happy a thing it was to live. 

Jeannot looked up at her, then went on his slow 
sad way through the wet lavender-shrubs and the 
opening buds of the lilies. 

“ You will only think of that stranger, Bebee, 
never of any of us — never again,” he said; and 
9 ^ 


102 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


wearily opened the little gate and went through it, 
and down the daybreak stillness of the lane. It 
was a foolish thing to say ; but when were lovers 
ever wise ? 

Bebee did not heed ; she did not understand her- 
self or him ; she only knew that she was happy ; 
when one knows that, one does not want to seek 
much further. 

She sat on the thatch and took her bread and 
milk in the gray clear air, with the swallows circling 
above her head, and one or two of them even rest- 
ing a second on the edge of the bowl to peck at the 
food from the big wooden spoon ; they had known 
her all the sixteen summers of her life, and were 
her playfellows, only they would never tell her any- 
thing of what they saw in winter over the seas. 
That was her only quarrel with them. Swallows 
do not tell their secrets. They have the weird of 
Procne on them all. 

The sun came and touched the lichens of the 
roof into gold. 

Bebee smiled at it gayly as it rose above the tops 
of the trees, and shone on all the little villages 
scattered over the plains. 

“ Ah, dear Sun !” she cried to it. “ I am going 
to be wise. I am going into great Eubes’ country. 
I am going to hear of the Past and the Future. I 
am going to listen to what the Poets say. The 
swallows never would tell me anything ; but now 
I shall know as much as they know. Are you not 
glad for me, O Sun V 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


103 


The Sun came over the trees, and heard and said 
nothing. If he had answered at all he must have 
said, — 

“The only time when a human soul is either 
wise or happy, is in that one single moment when the 
hour of my own shining or of the moon’s beaming 
seems to that single soul to be past and present 
and future, to be at once the creation and the end 
of all things. Faust knew that ; so will you.” 

But the Sun shone on and held his peace. He 
sees all things ripen and fall. He can wait. He 
knows the end. It is always the same. 

He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and 
rounds it and touches it into ruddiest rose and soft- 
est gold ; but the sun knows well that the peach 
must drop — whether into the basket to be eaten by 
kings, or on to the turf to be eaten by ants. What 
matter which very much after all ? 

The Sun is not a cynic ; he is only wise because 
he is Life and he is Heath, the creator and the 
corrupter of all things. 



CHAPTER IX. 



jlUT Bebee, who only saw in the sun the 
sign of daily work, the brightness of the 
face of the world, the friend of the flowers, 
the harvest-man of the poor, the playmate of the 
birds and butterflies, the kindly light that the 
waking birds and the ringing carillon welcomed — 
Bebee, who was not at all afraid of him, smiled at 
his rays and saw in them only fairest promise of a 
cloudless midsummer day as she gave her last 
crumb to the swallows, dropped down oflf the 
thatch, and busied herself in making bread that 
M^re Krebs would bake for her, until it was time 
to cut her flowers and go down into the town. 

When her loaves were made and she had run 
over with them to the mill-house and back again, 
she attired herself with more heed than usual, 
and ran to look at her own face in the mirror of 
the deep well-water — other glass she had none. 

She was used to hear herself called pretty; but 
she had never thought about it at all till now. 
The people loved her; she had always believed 
that they had only said it as a sort of kindness, as 
they said, “ God keep you.’’ But now — 

104 



TWO JdTTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


105 


'' He told me I was like a flower,” she thought 
to herself, and hung over the well to see. She 
did not know very well what he had meant ; but 
the sentence stirred in her heart as a little bird 
under tremulous leaves. 

She waited ten minutes full, leaning and look- 
ing down, while her eyes, that were like the blue 
iris, smiled back to her from the brown depths 
below. Then she went and kneeled down before 
the old shrine in the wall of the garden. 

Dear and holy Mother of Jesus, I do thank 
you that you made me a little good to look at,” 
she said, softly. “Keep me as you keep the 
flowers, and let my face be always fair, because 
it is a pleasure to be a pleasure. Ah, dear Mother, 
I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, I know. 
But I do not think you will be angry, will you? 
And I am going to try to be wise.” 

Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in 
form as it were, and then rose and ran along the 
lanes with her baskets, and brushed the dew lightly 
over her bare feet, and sang a little Flemish song 
for very joyousness, as the birds sing in the apple- 
bough. 

She got the money for Annemie and took it to 
her with fresh patterns to prick, and the new-laid 
eggs. 

“ I wonder what he meant by a dog’s heart ?” 
she thought to herself, as she left the old woman 
sitting by the hole in the roof pricking out the 
parchment in all faith that she earned her money, 


t06 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


and looking every now and then through the 
forests of masts for the brig with the hank of flax 
flying, — the brig that had foundered fifty long years 
before in the northern seas, and in the days of her 
youth. 

“What is the dog’s heart?” thought Bebee; 
she had seen a dog she knew — a dog who all his 
life long had dragged heavy loads under brutal 
stripes along the streets of Brussels — stretch him- 
self on the grave of his taskmaster and refuse to 
eat, and persist in lying there until he died, though 
he had no memory except of stripes, and no tie to 
the dead except pain and sorrow. Was it a heart 
like this that he meant ? 

“Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?” she 
asked an old gossip of Annemie’s, as she went down 
the stairs. 

The old soul stopped to think with difficulty of 
such a far-off time, and resting her brass flagon of 
milk on the steep step. 

“ Eh, no ; not that I ever saw,” she answered at 
length. “ He was fond of her — very fond ; but he 
was a willful one, and he beat her sometimes when 
he got tired of being on land. But women must 
not mind that, you know, my dear, if only a man’s 
heart is right. Things fret them, and then they be- 
labor what they love best ; it is a way they have. 

“ But she speaks of him as of an angel nearly !” 
said Bebee, bewildered. 

The old woman took up her flagon, with a smile 
flitting across her wintry face. # 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


107 


‘‘ Ay, dear ; when the frost kills your brave rose- 
bush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns 
that pricked you, or only of the fair, sweet-smell- 
ing things that flowered all your summer ?” 

Bebee went away thoughtfully out of the old 
crazy water-washed house by the quay; life 
seemed growing very strange and intricate and 
knotted about her, like the threads of lace that a 
bad fairy has entangled in the night. 



CHAPTER X. 

stranger from Rubes’ land was a great 
n in a certain world. He had become 
sat when young, which is perhaps a mis- 
fortune. It indisposes men to be great at their 
maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a picture 
hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made 
Paris at his feet. He became more famous by 
verses, by plays, by political follies, and by social 
successes. He was faithful, however, to his first 
love in art. He was a great painter, and year by 
year proved afresh the cunning of his hand. 
Purists said his pictures had no soul in them. 
It was not wonderful if they had none. He 
always painted soulless vice ; indeed, he saw very 
little else. 

One year he had some political trouble. He 
wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it was 
perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed the bor- 
der, riding into the green Ardennes one sunny 
evening. He had a name of some power and 
sufficient wealth ; he did not fear long exile. 
Meanwhile he told himself he would go and look 
at Schefter’s Gretchen. 

108 



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


109 


The King of Thule is better; but people talk 
most of the Gretchen. He had never seen either. 

He went in leisurely, traveling up the bright 
Meuse River, and across the monotony of the plains, 
then green with wheat a foot high, and musical 
with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in 
the quaint old-world villages. 

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harm- 
less, so mediaeval, in the Flemish life, that it soothed 
him. He had been swimming all his life in salt sea- 
fed rapids; this sluggish, dull canal-water, mirror- 
ing between its rushes a life that had .scarcely 
changed for centuries, had a charm for him. 

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is 
ugly and beautiful ; it is like a dull quaint gres de 
Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside its 
rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, 
of sale and barter, of loss and gain; but in the 
heart of it there are illuminated leaves of missal 
vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and 
heroic ballad, that could only have been executed 
in the days when Art was a religion. 

He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, 
whom before he had slighted, never having known 
(for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd 
to say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think 
that you have seen Murillo out of Seville, or Raf- 
faelle out of Rome) ; and he studied the Gretchen 
carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved 
Scheffer; but though he tried, he failed to care 
for her. 

10 


110 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“She is only a peasant; she is not a poem,” he 
said to himself ; “ I will paint a Gretchen for the 
Salon of next year.” 

But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. 
All his pictures were Phryne — Phryne in triumph, 
in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of 
roses, on a hospital mattress ; Phryne laughing with 
a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne 
lying with the stones of the dead-house under her 
naked limbs — but always Phryne. Phryne, who 
living had death in her smile ; Phryne, who lifeless 
had blank despair on her face; Phryne, a thing 
that lived furiously every second of her days, but 
Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion 
that never could live again. 

Phryne has many painters in this school, as many 
as Catherine and Cecilia had in the schools of the 
Kenaissance, and he was chief amidst them. 

How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer 
missed ? Hot even if, like the artist monks of old, 
he steeped his brushes all Lent through in holy 
water. 

And in holy water he did not believe. 

One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its 
innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art, 
he leaned out of the casement of an absent friend’s 
old palace in the Brabant street that is named after 
Mary of Burgundy ; an old casement crusted with 
quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fash- 
ion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible 
scutcheons. 


TIFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. m 

Leaning there, wondering with himself whether 
he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim 
street, haunted with the shades of Memling and 
Maes, and Otto Yeneris and Philip de Champagne, 
or whether he would go into the East and seek new 
types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and 
create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done 
yet — a young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and 
fresh from Caesar’s kisses — leaning there, he saw a 
little peasant go by below, with two little white 
feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the 
pure and simple radiance of a flower. 

There is my Gretchen,” he thought to himself, 
and went down and followed her into the cathe- 
dral. If he could get what was in her face, he 
would get what Schefier could not. 

A little later, walking by her in the green lanes, 
he meditated, “ It is the face of Gretchen, but not 
the soul — the Eed Mouse has never passed this 
child’s lips. Nevertheless ” 

‘‘Nevertheless ” he said to himself, and 

smiled. 

For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne 
living and of Phryne dead, believed that every 
daughter of Eve either vomits the Ked Mouse or 
swallows it. 

It makes so little difierence which, — either way 
the Red Mouse has been there. 

And yet, strolling there in the dusky red of the 
evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he for- 
got the Red Mouse, and began vaguely to see that 


112 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


there are creatures of his mother’s sex from whom 
the beast of the Brocken slinks away. 

But he still said to himself, “ Nevertheless.” 

‘^Nevertheless,” — for he knew well that when 
the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the 
fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king 
covets the vineyard, there is only one end possible 
at any time. It is the strong against the weak, the 
fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the 
simple, the master against the slave ; there is no 
equality in the contest and no justice — it is merely 
inevitable, and the issue of it is written. 



CHAPTEB XL 



|HE next day she had her promised book 
hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty 
basket as she went homeward, and though 
she had not seen him very long or spoken to him 
very much, she was happy. 

The golden gates of knowledge had just opened 
to her ; she saw a faint, far-off glimpse of the Hes- 
perides gardens within ; of the dragon she had 
never heard, and had no fear. 

‘‘ Might I know your name ?” she had asked him 
wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud, and 
taken the volume in return that day. 

“ They call me Flamen.’* 

‘‘ It is your name ?” 

“ Yes, for the world. You must call me Victor, 
as other women do. Why do you want my name 
Jeannot asked it of me.” 

“ Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he ?” 

“Yes; besides,” said Bebee, with her eyes very 
soft and very serious, and her happy voice hushed, 
“ besides, I want to pray for you of course, every 
day; and if I do not know your name, how can I 
make Our Lady rightly understand ? The flowers 
10 * H 113 



114 TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

' • 

know you without a name, but she might not, be- 
cause so very many are always beseeching her, and 
you see she has all the world to look after.” 

He had looked at her with a curious look, and 
had bade her farewell, and let her go home alone 
that night. 

Her work was quickly done, and by the light of 
the moon she spread her book on her lap in the 
porch of the hut and began her new delight. 

The children had come and pulled at her skirts 
and begged her to play. But Bebee had shaken 
her head. 

‘‘ I am going to learn to be very wise, dear,” she 
told them ; “ I shall not have time to dance or to 
play.” 

“ But people are not merry when they are wise, 
Bebee,” said Franz, the biggest boy. 

“ Perhaps not,” said Bebee ; “ but one cannot be 
everything, you know, Franz.” 

“ But surely, you would rather be merry than 
anything else ?” 

“ I think there is something better, Franz. I am 
not sure ; I want to find out ; I will tell you when 
I know.” 

“Who has put that into your head, Bebee?” 

“ The angels in the cathedral,” she told them ; 
and the children were awed and left her, and went 
away to play blind-man’s-bufi* by themselves, on the 
grass by the swan’s water. 

“ But for all that the angels have said it,” said 
Franz to his sisters, “ I cannot see what good it will 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


115 


be to her to be wise, if she will not care any longer 
afterwards for almond ginger-bread, and currant- 
cake.” 

It was the little tale of “ Paul and Virginia” that 
lie had given her to begin her studies with ; but it 
was a grand copy, full of beautiful drawings nearly 
at every page. 

It was hard work for her to read at first, but the 
drawings enticed and helped her, and she soon sank 
breathlessly into the charm of the story. Many 
words she did not know; many passages were 
beyond her comprehension ; she was absolutely 
ignorant, and had nothing but the force of her own 
fancy to aid her. 

But though stumbling at every step, as a lame 
child through a fiowery hillside in summer, she was 
happy as the child would be, because of the sweet, 
strange air that was blowing about her, and the 
blossoms that she could gather into her hand, so 
rare, so wonderful, and yet withal so familiar, be- 
cause they were blossoms. 

With her fingers buried in her curls, with her 
book on her knee, with the moonrays white and 
strong on the page, Bebee sat entranced as the 
hours went by; the children’s play shouts died 
away ; the babble of the gossip at the house doors 
ceased; people went by and called good-night to 
her ; the little huts shut up one by one, like the 
white and purple convolvulus cups in the hedges. 

Bebee did not stir, nor did she hear them ; she 
was deaf even to the singing of the nightingales in 


116 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


the willows, where she sat in her little dark porch, 
with, the ivy dropping from the thatch above, and 
the wet garden-ways beyond her. 

A heavy step came tramping down the lane. A 
voice called to her, — 

“ What are you doing, Bebee, there this time of 
the night ? It is on the strike of twelve.” 

She started as if she were doing some evil thing, 
and stretched her arms out, and looked around with 
blinded, wondering eyes, as if she had been rudely 
wakened from her sleep. 

“ What are you doing up so late ?” asked Jean- 
not ; he was coming from the forest, in the dead of 
night to bring food for his family; he lost his sleep 
thus often, but he never thought that he did any- 
thing except his duty in those long, dark, tiring 
tramps to and fro between Soignies and Laeken. 

Bebee shut her book and smiled with dreaming 
eyes, that saw him not at all. 

“I was reading and, Jeannot, his name is 

Flamen for the world — but I may call him Victor.” 

“ What do I care for his name ?” 

“ You asked it this morning.” 

“ More fool I. Why do you read ? Beading is 
not for poor folk like you and me.” 

Bebee smiled up at the white clear moon that 
sailed above the woods. 

She was not awake out of her dream. She only 
dimly heard the words he spoke. 

“ You are a little peasant,” said Jeannot roughly, 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


117 


as he paused at the gate. “ It is all you can do to 
get your bread. You have no one to stand between 
you and hunger. How will it be with you when 
the slug gets your roses, and the snail your carna- 
tions, and your hens die of damp, and your lace is 
all wove awry, because your head runs on reading 
and folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleas- 
ures and for all honest work 

She smiled, still looking up at the moon, with 
the dropping ivy touching her hair. 

“ You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good-night.” 

A moment afterwards the little rickety door was 
shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it; Jeannot 
stood in the cool summer night all alone, and knew 
how stupid he had been in his wrath. 

He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed 
the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would let 
him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the lattice. 

“Bebee — Bebee — just listen. I spoke roughly, 
dear — I know I have no right. I am sorry. Will 
you be friends with me again ? — do be friends 
again.” 

She opened the shutter a little way, so that he 
could see her pretty mouth speaking. 

Oh, Jeannot, what does it paatter ? Yes, we are 
friends — we will always be friends, of course — only 
you do not know. Good-night.” 

He went away with a heavy heart and a long- 
drawn step. He would have preferred that she 
should have been angry with him. 

Bebee, left alone, let the clothes drop off her 


118 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and 
shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book, 
and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with 
a smile on her face. 

Only, as she slept, her fingers moved as if she 
were counting her beads, and her lips murmured. 

“ Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to 
think of — yes, I know — all the poor, and all the 
little children. But take care of Mm ; he is called 
Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of 
Burgundy ; you cannot miss him ; and if you will 
look for him always, and have a heed that the 
angels never leave him, I will give you my great 
cactus fiower — my only one — on your Feast of 
Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will 
not forget r 



CHAPTER XIL 

was a dreamer in her way, and 
d to be a scholar too. But all the 
she was not a little fool. 

She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest 
ways of living, and would have thought it as 
shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to 
other folk. 

So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, 
full of strange phantasies, none the less was she 
out in her garden by daybreak ; none the less did 
she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the 
fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and hang it 
to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting holly- 
hocks that were so proud of themselves because 
they reached to the roof. 

“ What do you want with books, Bebee said 
Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, across the privet 
hedge, as she also hung out her linen. ‘‘Franz 
told me you were reading last night. It is the 
silver buckles have done that: one mischief always 
begets another.” 

“Where is the mischief, good Reine?” said 
Bebee, who was always prettily behaved with her 

119 




120 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold 
her own. 

“ The mischief will be in discontent,’’ said the 
sabot-maker’s wife. ‘‘ People live on their own 
little patch, and think it is the world ; that is as it 
should be — everybody within his own, like a nut 
in its shell. But w’hen you get reading, you hear 
of a swarm of things you never saw, and you fret 
because you cannot see them, and you dream, 
and dream, and a hole is burnt in your soup-pot, 
and your dough is as heavy as lead. You are like 
bees that leave their own clover-fields to buzz 
themselves dead against the glass of a hot- 
house.” 

Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. 
But she said nothing. 

“ What good is it talking to them?” she thought; 
“ they do not know.” 

Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy 
seemed so far, far away; creatures of a distant 
world, that she had long left ; it was no use talk- 
ing, they never would understand. 

‘‘ Antoine should never have taught you your 
letters,” said Peine, groaning under the great blue 
shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. 
‘‘ I told him so at the time. I said, ‘ The child is 
a good child, and spins, and sews, and sweeps, rare 
and fine for her age — why go and spoil her?’ But 
he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine 
knows a letter, — the saints be praised ! nor a word 
of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 121 

should have been brought up the same. You 
would have come to no trouble then.” 

“ I am in no trouble, dear Reine,” said Bebee, 
scattering the potato-peels to the clacking poultry, 
and she smiled into the faces of the golden oxlips 
that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sym- 
pathy. 

“Not yet,” said Reine, hanging her last shirt. 

But Bebee was not hearing; she was calling the 
chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty they 
looked in the borders ; and in her heart she was 
counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo- 
clock at Mere Krebs’s — the only clock in the lane — 
should crow out the hour at which she went down 
to the city. 

She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but 
they were little to her now compared with the dark 
golden picturesque square, the changing crowds, 
the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and the delight 
of watching through the shifting colors and shadows 
of the throngs for one face and for one smile. 

“ He is sure to be there,” she thought, and started 
half an hour earlier than was her wont. She 
wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book — no 
one else could understand. 

But all the day through he never came. 

Bebee sat with a sick heart and a parched little 
throat, selling her flowers and straining her eyes 
through the tumult of the square. 

The whole day went by, and there was no sign 
of him. 

11 


122 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


The flowers had sold well: it was a feast-day ; 
her pouch was full of pence — what was that to her ? 

She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it 
seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even the 
storied windows seemed dark. 

“ Perhaps he is gone out of the city,” she thought ; 
and a terror fell on her that frightened her, it was 
so unlike any fear that she had ever known — even 
the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine’s 
face had been nothing like this. 

Going home through the streets, she passed the 
cafe of the Trois Freres that looks out on the trees 
of the park, and that has flowers in its balconies, 
and pleasant windows that stand open to let the 
sounds of the soldiers’ music enter. She saw him 
in one of the windows. There were amber and 
scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets. 
There was a fan painted and jeweled. There 
were women’s faces. There was a heap of purple 
fruit, and glittering sweetmeats. He laughed 
there. His beautiful Murillo head was dark 
against the white and gold within. 

Bebee looked up — paused a second, — then went 
onward, with a thorn in her heart. 

He had not seen her. 

“ It is natural, of course — ^he has his world — he 
does not think often of me — there is no reason 
why be should be as good as he is,” she said 
to herself as she went slowly over the stones. 

She had the dog’s soul — only she did not 
know it. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 123 

But the tears fell down her cheeks, as she 
walked. 

It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the 
sound of the music coming in through the trees, 
and those women — she had seen such women 
before; sometimes in the winter nights, going 
home from the lace-work, she had stopped at the 
doors of the palaces, or of the opera-house, when 
the carriages were setting down their brilliant 
burdens; and sometimes on the great feast-days 
she had seen the people of the court going out to 
some gala at the theatre, or some great review of 
troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns ; 
but she had never thought about them before; 
she had never wondered whether velvet was better 
to wear than woolen serge, or diamonds lighter on 
the head than a little cap of linen. 

But now — 

Those women seemed to her so dazzlingly, so 
wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful ; they 
seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, 
rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the sun 
on the south border of her little garden, and 
blanched all the soft color out of the homely 
roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and 
double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since 
the days of Waterloo. 

But, the dahlias had no scent — and Bebee won- 
dered if these women had any heart in them — 
they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity. 
To the child, whose dreams of womanhood were 


124 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assam >- 
tion, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that An^el 
in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the 
sun, — to her who had dreamed her way into vague 
perceptions of her own sex’s maidenhood and 
maternity by help of those great pictures which had 
been before her sight from infancy, there was some 
taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in 
these jeweled women; she could not have rea- 
soned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the 
grand dahlias missed a fiower’s divinity, being 
scentless. 

She was a little bit of wild thyme herself ; hardy, 
fragrant, clean, tender, fiowering by the wayside, 
full of honey, though only nourished on the turf 
and the stones — these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright, 
scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense 
of pain and shame. 

Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to 
Father Francis : 

“I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied 
them ; and I could not pray to Mary last night for 
thinking of them — for I hated them so much.” 

But she did not say, — 

“ I hated them because they were with him.” 

Out of the purest little soul. Love entering drives 
forth Candor. 

“ That is not like you at all, Bebee,” said the 
good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks 
of his little bare study, where all the books he ever 
spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 125 

“ My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did 
you ever seem to care for the things of the world. 
I wish Jehan had not given you those silver 
buckles; I think they have set your little soul on 
vanities/’ 

“ It is not the buckles ; I am not covetous,” said 
Bebee; and then her face grew warm. She did 
not know why, and she did not hear the rest of 
Father Francis’s admonitions. 



CHAPTER XIIL 



UT the next noon-time brought him to tne 
market-stall, and the next also, and so the 
summer days slipped away, and Bebee was 
quite happy if she saw him in the morning-time, to 
give him a fresh rose, or at evening by the gates, 
or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a 
new book, and sauntered awhile up the green lane 
beside her. 

An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee’s wants 
so little food to make it all content. Such mere 
trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such slender 
stray gleams of light sufiice to make abroad, bright 
golden noon of perfect joy around it. 

All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and de- 
spair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from 
it: far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry 
skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the 
brown meadow brook. 

It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this 
stranger from Rubes’ Fairy-land, could come at all 
to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes 
over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight- 
time. The days went by in a trance of sweet 
126 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


127 


amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more 
by the cuckoo-clock of the millhouse, or the deep 
chimes of the Brussels belfries ; but only by such 
moments as brought her a word from his lips, or 
even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded 
square. 

She sat up half the nights reading the books he 
gave her, studying the long cruel polysyllables, and 
spelling slowly through the phrases that seemed to 
her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were 
a pleasure to unravel for sake of the thought they 
held. 

For Bebee, ignorant little simple soul that she 
was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant, 
quick to acquire, skillful to retain ; and it would 
happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to 
her of the things which he gave to her to read, 
would think to himself that this child had more 
wisdom than was often to be found in schools. 

Meanwhile he pondered various studies in vari- 
ous stages of a Gretchen, and made love to Bebee 
— made love at least by his eyes and by his voice, 
not hurrying his pleasant task, hut hovering about 
her softly, and mindful not to scare her, as a man 
will gently lower his hand over a poised butterfly 
that he seeks to kill, and which one single move- 
ment, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety. 

Bebee knew where he lived in the street of Mary 
of Burgundy ; in an old palace that belonged to a 
great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there him- 
self ; but to ask anything about him — why he was 


128 ^^0 LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

there ? what his rank was ? why he stayed in the 
city at all ? was a sort of treason that never entered 
her thoughts. 

Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as 
Bebee was, would never have lighted her own 
candle ; but even Psyche would not have borrowed 
any one else’s lamp to lighten the love darkness. 

To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, un- 
questionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happi- 
ness that had fallen into her life ; he was a gift of 
God, as the sun was. 

She took his going and coming as she took that 
of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching his ab- 
sence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty 
night he shone on any other worlds than hers. 

It was hardly so much a faith with her as an in- 
stinct; faith must reason ere it know itself to be 
faith. Bebee never reasoned any more than her 
roses did. 

The good folks in the market-place watched her 
a little anxiously : they thought ill of that little 
moss-rose that every day found its way to one 
wearer only ; but after all they did not see much, 
and the neighbors nothing at all. For he never 
went home to her, nor with her, and most of the 
time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet 
evening shadows, as she went up with her empty 
basket through the deserted country roads. 

Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as 
other girls were, hut with her it had always been 
different. Antoine had always been with her up to 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


129 


the day of his death ; and after his death she had 
sat in the same place, surrounded by the people 
she had known from infancy, and an insult to her 
would have been answered by a stroke from the 
cobbler’s strap or from the tinker’s hammer. There 
was one girl only who ever tried to do her any 
harm — a good-looking, stout wench, who stood at 
the corner of the Montagne de la Cour with a stall 
of fruit in the summer-time, and in winter-time 
drove a milk-cart over the snow. This girl would 
get at her sometimes, and talk of the students, and 
tell her how good it was to get out of the town on a 
holiday, and go to any one of the villages where 
there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little 
blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and 
come home in the moonlight in a char-^-banc, with 
the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the 
ribbons flying from the old horse’s ears. 

‘‘She is such a little close sly thing!” thought 
the fruit-girl, sulkily. To vice, innocence must 
always seem only a superior kind of chicanery. 

“We dance almost every evening, the children 
and I,” Bebee had answered when urged fifty times 
by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wine- 
shops. “ That does just as well. And I have seen 
Kermesse once at Malines — it was beautiful. I 
went with M^re Dax, but it cost a great deal I 
know, though she did not let me pay.” 

“ You little fool !” the fruit-girl would say, and 
grin, and eat a pear. 

But the good honest old women who sat about 


130 


TIFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


in the Grande Place, hearing, had always taken 
the fruit-girl to task, when they got her by her- 
self. 

“ Leave the child alone, you mischievous one,” 
said they. “Be content with being base your- 
self. Look you, Lisette — she is not one like you 
to make eyes at the law-students, and pester the 
painter lads for a day’s outing. Let her be, or we 
will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for 
the gutter children to pick and thieve, while you 
are stealing up the stairs into that young French 
fellow’s chamber. Oh, oh ! a fine beating you will 
get when she knows !” 

Lisette’s mother was a fierce and strong old Bra- 
bantoise, who exacted heavy reckoning with her 
daughter for every single plum and peach that she 
sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit-shop to be 
sunned in the streets, and under the students’ love- 
glances. 

So the girl took heed, and left Bebee alone. 

“ What should I want her to come with us for ?” 
she reasoned with herself. “ She is twice as pretty 
as I am; Jules might take to her instead — who 
knows ?” 

So that she was at once savage and yet triumph- 
ant when she saw, as she thought, Bebee drifting 
down the high fiood of temptation. 

“ Oh, oh, you dainty one !” she cried one day to 
her. “ So you would not take the nuts and mul- 
berries that do for us common folk, because you 
had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses ! 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


131 


That was all, was it ? Eh, well — I do not begrudge 
you. Only take care; remember, the nuts and 
mulberries last through summer and autumn, and 
there are heaps of them on every fair-stall and 
street-corner ; but the pine — that is eaten in a day, 
one Fpring-time, and its like does not grow in the 
hedges. You will have your mouth full of sugar 
an hour — and then, eh ! — you will go famished all 
the year.” 

“ I do not understand,’’ said Bebee, looking up, 
with her thoughts far away, and scarcely hearing 
the words spoken to her. 

“ Oh, pretty little fool ! you understand well 
enough,” said Lisette, grinning, as she rubbed up 
a melon. “Does he give you fine things? You 
might let me see.” 

“ one gives me anything.” 

“ Chut ! you want me to believe that. Why 
Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk-mercer, 
and only gives him a hundred francs a month, but 
Jules buys me all I want — somehow — or do you 
think I would take the trouble to set my cap straight 
when he goes by ? He gave me these ear-rings, 
look. I wish you would let me see what you get.” 

But Bebee had gone away — unheeding — dream- 
ing of Juliet and of Jeanne d’Arc, of whom he 
had told her tales. 

He made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom 
pleased himself. 

It was not so easy as he had imagined that it 
would prove to portray this little flower-like face, 


132 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


with the clear eyes and the child’s open brow. He 
who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had 
got a taint on his brush — he could not paint this 
pure, bright, rosy dawn — he who had always 
painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. 
Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the 
light that was on Bebee’s face he would get what 
Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. 
You shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a 
fan of peacock’s feathers, to perfection, and yet, 
perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little 
field-daisy shall baffle and escape you. 

He felt, too, that he must catch her expression 
flying as he would do the flash of a swallow’s wing 
across a blue sky ; he knew that Bebee, forced to 
studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer 
the ideal that he wanted. 

More than once he came and filled in more 
fully his various designs in the little hut garden, 
among the sweet gray lavender and the golden 
disks of the sunflowers ; and more than once Bebee 
was missed from her place in the front of the 
Broodhuis. 

The Varnhart children would gather now and 
then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mere Krebs 
would shake her head as she went by on her 
sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child’s head 
would be turned by vanity; and old Jehan would 
lean on his stick and peer through the sweet-brier, 
and wonder ' stupidly if this strange man who 
could make Bebee’s face beam over again upon 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


133 


that panel of wood could not give him back his 
dead daughter who had been pushed away under 
the black earth so long, long before, when the red 
mill had been brave and new, the red mill that the 
boys and girls called old. 

But except these, no one noticed much. 

Painters were no rare sights in Brabant. 

The people were used to see them coming and 
going, making pictures of mud and stones, and 
ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly 
things. 

“What does he pay you, Bebee?’’ they used to 
ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the 
main chance. 

“ ITothing,’’ Bebee would answer, with a quick 
color in her face ; and they would reply in con- 
temptuous reproof, “ Careless little fool ; — you 
should make enough to buy you wood all winter. 
When the man from Ghent painted Trine and her 
cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing 
still so long in the clover. The Krebs would be 
sure to lend you her cow if it be the cow that 
makes the difference.’’ 

Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation-bed ; — 
what could she tell them that they would under- 
stand ? 

She seemed so far away from them all — those 
good friends of her childhood — now that this won- 
derful new world of his giving had opened to her 
sight. 

She lived in a dream. 

12 


134 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Whether she sat in the market-place taking 
copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book on 
her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran, her 
tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not 
neglect her goat or her garden, she did not forsake 
her house labor or her good deeds to old Annemie ; 
but all the while she only heard one voice, she only 
felt one touch, she only saw one face. 

Here and there — one in a million — there is a 
female thing that can love like this, once and for 
ever. 

Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the 
Mater Dolorosa. 

He had something nearer akin to affection for 
her than he had ever had in his life for anything, 
but he was never in love with her — no more in 
love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that 
she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with 
her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting, 
female thing; and because, to see her face flush, 
and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir 
into life, and to watch her changes from shyness 
to confidence, and from frankness again into fear, 
was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather. 

That he spared her as far as he did — when after 
all she would have married Jeannot anyhow, — and 
that he sketched her face in the open air, and never 
entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own 
old palace in the city, was a new virtue in himself 
for which he hardly knew whether to feel respect 
or ridicule ; anyway it seemed virtue to him. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHCES. 


135 


So long as he did not seduce the body it seemed 
to him that it could never matter how he slew the 
soul — the little, honest, happy, pure, frank soul, 
that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a 
robin’s song to the winter sun. 

“ Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no bet- 
ter than the rest of us,” hissed her enemy, Lisette, 
the fruit-girl, against her as she went by the stall 
one evening as the sun set. “ Prut ! so it was no 
such purity after all that made you never look at 
the student lads and the soldiers, eh ? — You were 
so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose, 
and. Lord’s sake, after all your coyness, to drop at 
a beckoning finger as one may say — pong ! — in a 
minute, like an apple over-ripe ! Oh he, you sly 
one !” 

Bebee flushed red, in a sort of instinct of ofiense; 
not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by 
the brutal words. 

Bebee walked homeward by him, with her 
empty baskets: looked at him with grave wonder- 
ing eyes. 

“ What did she mean ? I do not understand. I 
must have done some wrong — or she thinks so. 
Do you know ? ” 

Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively : 

“ You have done her the wrong of a fair skin 
when hers is brown, and a little foot while hers 
is as big as a trooper’s ; there is no greater sin, 
Bebee, possible in woman to woman.” 

“ Hold your peace, you shrill jade,” he added, in 


136 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her a crown piece, 
that the girl caught, and bit with her teeth with a 
chuckle. “Do not heed her, Bebee. She is a 
coarse-tongued brute, and is jealous, no doubt.” 

“ Jealous ? — of what ?” 

The word had no meaning to Bebee. 

“ That I am not a student or a soldier, as her 
lovers are.” 

As her lovers were ! Bebee felt her face burn 
again. Was he her lover then ? The child’s inno- 
cent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet de- 
light and fear commingled. 

Bebee was not quite satisfied until she had knelt 
down that night and asked the Master of all poor 
maidens to see if there were any wickedness in her 
heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there 
were to take it out and make her worthier of this 
wonderful new happiness in her life. 


CHAPTER XIV. 


next day, waking with a radiant little 
soul as a bird in a forest wakes in summer, 
Bebee was all alone in the lane by the 
swans’ water. In the gray of the dawn all the 
good folk except herself and lame old Jehan had 
tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liege way, which the 
bishop of the city had enjoined on all the faithful 
as a sacred duty. 

Bebee doing her work, singing, thinking how 
good God was, and dreaming over a thousand 
fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her, 
and of the exquisite delight that would lie for her 
in watching for him all through the shining hours, 
Bebee felt her little heart leap like a squirrel as the 
voice that was the music of heaven to her called 
through the stillness, — 

Good-day, pretty one ! you are as early as the 
lark, Bebee. I go to Mayence, so I thought I 
would look at you one moment as I pass.” 

Bebee ran down through the wet grass in a tu- 
mult of joy. She had never seen him so early in 
the day — never so early as this, when nobody was 
up and stirring except birds and beasts and peasant 
folk. 

12 * 


137 


138 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


She did not know how pretty she looked herself; 
like a rain-washed wild rose ; her feet gleaming 
with dew, her cheeks warm with health and joy; 
her sunny clustering hair free from the white cap 
and tumbling a little about her throat, because she 
had been stooping over the carnations. 

Flamen loosed the wicket latch, and thought 
there might be better ways of spending the day 
than in the gray shadows of old Mechlin. 

“ Will you give me a draught of water ?” he 
asked her as he crossed the garden. 

“ I will ’give you breakfast,” said Bebee, happy 
as a bird. She felt no shame for the smallness 
of her home ; no confusion at the poverty of her 
little place ; such embarrassments are born of self- 
consciousness, and Bebee had no more self-con- 
sciousness than her own sweet, gray lavender-bush 
blowing against the door. 

The lavender -bush has no splendor like the 
roses, has no colors like the hollyhocks ; it is a 
simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and 
that the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth 
from the homespun linen, and that goes with the 
dead to their graves. 

It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but 
it does not know it or think of it ; and if the village 
girls ever tell it so, it fancies they only praise it out 
of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears 
away in their warm bosoms. Bebee was like her 
lavender, and now that this beautiful Purple Em- 
peror butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


139 


find pleasure for a second in her freshness, she waa 
only very grateful, as the lavender-bush was to the 
village girls. 

“I will give you your breakfast,” said Behee, 
fiushing rosily with pleasure, and putting away the 
ivy coils that he might enter. 

I have very little, you know,” she added, wist- 
fully. “ Only goat’s milk and bread ; but if that 
will do — and there is some honey — and if you would 
eat a salad, I would cut one fresh.” 

He did enter, and glanced round him with a 
curious pity and wonder both in one. 

It was such a little, small, square place ; and its 
fioor was of beaten clay ; and its unceiled roof he 
could have touched ; and its absolute poverty was 
so plain, — and yet the child looked so happy in it, 
and was so like a flower, and was so dainty and 
fresh, and even so full of grace. 

She stood and looked at him with frank and 
grateful eyes ; she could hardly believe that he was 
here ; he, the stranger of Kubes’ land, in her own 
little rush-covered home. 

But she was not embarrassed by it ; she was glad 
and proud. 

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings 
— the dignity that comes from all absence of efibrt, 
all freedom from pretense. Behee had this, and 
she had more still than this : she had the absolute 
simplicity of childhood with her still. 

Some women have it still when they are four- 
score. 


140 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


She could have looked at him forever, she was 
so happy ; she cared nothing now for those daz- 
zling dahlias — he had left them ; he was actually 
here — here in her own, little, dear home, with the 
cocks looking in at the threshold, and the sweet- 
peas nodding at the lattice, and the starling cry- 
ing “ Bonjour ! Bonjour !” 

“You are tired, I am sure you must be tired, 
she said, pulling her little bed forward for him to 
sit on, for there were only two wooden stools in the 
hut, and no chair at all. 

Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes 
from his hand, and would have kneeled and taken 
the dust ofl* his boots if he would have let her ; and 
went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bring- 
ing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest of the 
slender fare, and cutting as quick as thought fresh 
cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing 
him, as the crown of all. Father Francis’s honey- 
comb on vine-leaves, with some pretty sprays of 
box and mignonette scattered about it — doing all 
this with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor 
of all look of servitude, and looking at him ever 
and again with a smile that said as clearly as any 
words, “ I cannot do much, but what I do, I do 
with aL my heart.” 

There was something in the sight of her going 
and coming in those simple household errands, 
across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some 
mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her 
cows to pasture may move a listener who indifler- 


TIFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


141 


ent has heard the swell of the organ of La Hague, 
or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo. 

The gray lavender blowing at the house-door 
has its charm for those who are tired of the 
camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of mid- 
night suppers. 

This man was not good. He was idle and vain, 
and amorous and cold, and had been spoiled by 
the world in which he had passed his days; but 
he had the temper of an artist ; he had something, 
too, of a poet’s fancy; he was vaguely touched 
and won by this simple soul that looked at him 
out of Bebee’s eyes with some look that in all its 
simplicity had a divine gleam in it that made him 
half ashamed. 

He had known women by the thousand, good 
women and bad; women whom he had dealt ill 
with and women who had dealt ill with him ; but 
this he had not known — this frank, fearless, ten- 
der, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little life, 
helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, work- 
ing for itself and for others, and vaguely seeking 
all the while some unseen light, some unknown 
god, with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and 
yet so infinitely pathetic. 

“ All the people are gone on a pilgrimage,” she 
explained to him when he asked her why her 
village was so silent this bright morning. “ They 
are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and then each 
one prays for some other little thing that she 
wants herself as well — it costs seven francs apiece. 


142 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


They take their food with them; they go and 
laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is nonsense. 
One can say one’s prayers just as well here. Mere 
Krebs thinks so too, but then she says, ‘ If I do 
not go, it will look ill ; people will say I am irre- 
ligious; and as we make so much by flour, God 
would think it odd for me to be absent ; and, be- 
sides, it is only seven francs there and back; and 
if it does please Heaven, that is cheap, you know. 
One will get it over and over again in Paradise.’ 
That is what Mere Krebs says. But, for me, I 
think it is nonsense. It cannot please God to go 
by train and eat galette and waste a whole day in 
getting dusty. 

“When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do 
give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on her 
altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here all the 
week, and then, of course, she sees that I have 
done it out of gratitude. But that is difterent: 
that I am sorry to do, and yet I am glad to do it 
out of love. Do you not know ?” 

“Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin all 
that you love like this ?” 

“ Ko ; there is the garden, and there is Antoine 
— he is dead, I know. But I think that we should 
love the dead all the better, not the less, because 
they cannot speak or say that they are angry ; and 
perhaps one pains them very much when one neg- 
lects them, and if they are ever so sad, they cannot 
rise and rebuke one — that is why I would rather 
forget the flowers for the Church than I would the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


143 


flowers for his grave, because God can punish me, 
of course, if he like, hut Antoine never can — any 
more — now.” 

“ You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,” 
said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared 
to feel. ‘‘The union is a rare one in your sex. 
Who taught you to reason ?” 

“No one. And I do not know what to be 
logical means. Is it that you laugh at me ?” 

“No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrims — 
they are gone for all day ?” 

“Yes. They are gone to the Sacred Heart at 
St. Marie en Bois. It is on the way to Liege. 
They will come hack at night-fall. And some of 
them will be sure to have drunk too much, and 
the children will get so cross. Prosper Bar, who 
is a Calvinist, always says, ‘ Do not mix up prayer 
and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your 
honey hut I do not know why he called prayer a 
gherkin, because it is sweet enough — sweeter than 
anything, I think. When I pray to the Virgin to 
let me see you next day, I go to bed quite happy, 
because she will do it, I know, if it will be good 
for me.” 

“ But if it were not good for you, Bebee ? 
Would you cease to wish it then ?” 

He rose as he spoke, and went across the floor 
and drew away her hand that was parting the flax, 
and took it in his own and stroked it, indulgently 
and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of 
a young cat. 


144 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


Leaning against the little lattice and looking 
down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half 
serious, half amorous, half sad, Bebee looked up 
with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through 
her as the charm of the snake’s gaze runs through 
the bewildered bird. 

“ "Would you cease to wish if it were not good?” 
he asked again. 

Bebee’s face grew pale and troubled. She left 
her hand in his because she did not think any 
shame of his taking it. But the question sud- 
denly flung the perplexity and darkness of doubt 
into the clearness of her pure child’s conscience. 
All her ways had been straight and sunlit before 
her. 

She had never had a divided duty. 

The religion and the pleasure of her simple little 
life had always gone hand-in-hand, greeting one 
another, and never for an instant in conflict. In 
any hesitation of her own she had always gone to 
Father Francis, and he had disentangled the web 
for her and made all plain. 

But here was a difficulty in which she could 
never go to Father Francis. 

Eight and wrong, duty and desire, were for the 
first time arrayed before her in their ghastly and 
unending warfare. 

It frightened her with a certain breathless sense 
of peril — the peril of a time when in lieu of that 
gentle Mother of Eoses whom she kneeled to 
aotiong the flowers, she would only see a dusky 


Tiro LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I45 

shadow looming between her and the beauty of 
life and the light of the sun. 

What he said was quite vague to her. She at- 
tached no definite danger to his words. She only 
thought — to see him was so great a joy — if Mary 
forbade it, would she not take it if she could not- 
withstanding, always, always, always ? 

He kept her hand in his, and watched with con- 
tentment the changing play of the shade and 
sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face. 

“You do not know, Bebee?” he said at length, 
knowing well himself ; so much better than ever 
she knew. “Well, dear — that is not flattering to 
me. But it is natural. The good Virgin of course 
gives you all you have, food, and clothes, and your 
garden, and your pretty plump chickens — and I am 
only a stranger. You could not offend her for me 
— that is not likely.” 

The child was cut to the heart by the sadness 
and humility of words of whose studied artifice she 
had no suspicion. 

She thought that she seemed to him ungrateful 
and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes that held 
jer little boat of life to the harbor of its simple 
religion seemed cut away, and she seemed drifting 
nelpless and rudderless upon an unknown sea. 

“ I never did do wrong — that I know,” she said 
timidly, and lifted her eyes to his with an un- 
conscious appeal in them. 

« But — I do not see why it should be wrong to 
speak with you. You are good, and you lend me 
13 K 


146 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


beautiful things out of other men’s minds that will 
make me less ignorant: Our Lady could not be 
angry with that — she must like it.’’ 

“ Our Lady ? — oh, poor little simpleton ! — where 
will her reign be when Ignorance has once been 
cut down, root and branch ?” he thought to him- 
self ; but he only answered, — 

“ But whether she like it or not, Bebee ? — ^you 
beg the question, my dear ; you are — you are not 
so frank as usual — think, and tell me honestly ?” 

He knew quite well, but it amused him to see 
the perplexed trouble that this, the first divided 
duty of her short years, brought with it. 

Bebee looked at him, and loosened her hand from 
his, and sat quite still. Her lips had a little quiver 
in them. 

“I think,” she said at last, “I think — if it be 
wrong, still I will wish it — ^yes. Only I will not 
tell myself it is right. I will just say to Our Lady, 
‘ I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help it.’ So 
— I will not deceive her at all ; and perhaps in time 
she may forgive. But I think you only say it to 
try me. It cannot, I am sure, be wrong — any more 
than it is to talk to Jeannot or to Bac.” 

He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt, 
but the honest little soul in her found a way out, 
as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the 
stones to light. 

He plucked the ivy-leaves and threw them at the 
chickens on the bricks without, with a certain im- 
patience in the action. The simplicity and the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


147 


directness of the answer disarmed him; he was 
almost ashamed to use against her the weapons of 
his habitual warfare. It was like a maitre d’armes 
fencing with bare steel against a little naked child 
armed with a blest palm-sheaf. 

When she had thus brought him all she had, and 
he to please her had sat down to the simple food, 
she gathered a spray of roses and set it in a pot 
beside him, then left him and went and stood at a 
little distance, waiting, with her hands lightly 
crossed on her chest, to see if there were anything 
that he might want. 

He ate and drank well to please her, looking at 
her often as he did so. 

“I break your bread, Bebee,” he said, with a 
tone that seemed strange to her. “ I break your 
bread. I must keep Arab faith with you.’’ 

“ What is that ?” 

‘‘I mean — I must never betray you.” 

“ Betray me ! How could you ?” 

Well — hurt you in any way.” 

“ Ah, I am sure you would never do that.” 

He was silent, and looked at the spray of roses. 

“Sit down and spin,” he said impatiently. “I 
am ashamed to see you stand there, and a woman 
never looks so well as when she spins. Sit down 
— and I will eat the good things you have brought 
me. But I cannot if you stand and look.” 

“ I beg your pardon, I did not know,” she said, 
ashamed lest she should have seemed rude to him ; 
and she drew out her wheel under the light of the 


148 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


lattice, and sat down to it, and began to disentangle 
the threads. 

It was a pretty picture— the low, square case- 
ment ; the frame of ivy, the pink and white of the 
climbing sweet-peas ; the girPs head ; the cool, wet 
leaves; the old wooden spinning-wheel, that purred 
like a sleepy cat. 

“ I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it will be 
a shame,” he said. 

“Who is Gretchen?” 

“ You shall read of her by-and-by. And you live 
here all by yourself?” 

“ Since Antoine died — ^yes.” 

“ And are never dull ?” 

“ I have no time, and I do not think I would be 
if I had time — there is so much to think of, and 
one never can understand.” 

“But you must be very brave and laborious to 
do all your work yourself. Is it possible a child 
like you can spin, and wash, and bake, and garden, 
and do everything ?” 

“ Oh, many do more than 1. Babette’s eldest 
daughter is only twelve, and she does much more, 
because she has all the children to look after ; and 
they are very, very poor ; they often have nothing 
but a stew of nettles and perhaps a few snails, days 
together.” 

“That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty; 
there is plenty of that everywhere. But you, 
Bebee — you are an idyll.” 

Bebee looked across the hut and smiled, and 





>4 







TTFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I49 

broke her thread. She did not know what he 
meant, but if she were anything that pleased him, 
it was well. 

“ Who were those beautiful women ?” she said 
suddenly, the color mounting into her cheeks. 

“ What women, my dear 

“ Those I saw at the window with you, the other 
night — they had jewels.’' 

“ Oh ! — women, tiresome enough ; if I had seen 
you, I would have dropped you some fruit. Poor 
little Bebee ! Did you go by, and I never knew 

“ You were laughing ” 

“Was I?” 

“Yes, and they were beautiful.’' 

“ In their own eyes ; not in mine.” 

“No?” 

She stopped her spinning and gazed at him with 
wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that they were 
not beautiful to him ? those deep red, glowing, sun- 
basked dahlia flowers ? 

“ Do you know,” she said very softly, with a flush 
of penitence that came and went, “ when I saw 
them, I hated them ; I confessed it to Father Fran- 
cis next day. You seemed so content with them, 
and they looked so gay and glad there — and then 
the jewels! Somehow, I seemed to myself such a 
little thing, and so ugly and mean. And yet, do 
you know ” 

“And yet — well ?” 

“ They did not look to me good — those women,” 
said Bebee thoughtfully, looking across at him in 
13 * 


150 'I'WO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

deprecation of his possible anger. ‘‘They wer 
great people, I suppose, and they appeared very 
happy; but though I seemed nothing to myself 
after them, still I think I would not change.” 

“You are wise without books, Bebee.” 

“ Oh, no — I am not wise at all. I only feel. And 
give me books; oh, pray, give me books ! You do 
not know ; I will learn so fast — and I will not neg- 
lect anything, that I promise. The neighbors and 
Jeannot say that I shall let the flowers die, and the 
hut get dirty, and never spin or prick Annemie’s 
patterns ; but that is untrue. I will do all, just as 
I have done, and more too, if only you will give 
me things to read, for I do think when one is happy, 
one ought to work more — not less.” 

“ But will these books make you happy ? If you 
ask me the truth, I must tell you — no. You are 
happy as you are, because you know nothing else 
than your own little life ; for ignorance is happiness, 
Bebee, let sages, ancient and modern, say what they 
will. But when you know a little, you will want to 
know more ; and when you know much you will 
want to see much also, and then — and then — ^the 
thing will grow — ^you will be no longer content 
That is, you will be unhappy.” 

Bebee watched him with wistful eyes. 

“ Perhaps that it is true. Ho doubt it is true, if 
you say it. But you know all the world seems full 
of voices that I hear, but that I cannot understand ; 
it is with me as I should think it is with people who 
go to foreign countries and do not know the tongue 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


151 


that is spoken when they land ; and it makes me 
unhappy, because I cannot comprehend, and so the 
books will not make me more so, but less. And 
as for being content — when I thought you were 
gone away out of the city, last night, I thought I 
would never be able to pray any more, because I 
hated myself, and I almost hated the angels, and I 
told Mary that she was cruel, and she turned her 
face from me — as it seemed, forever.” 

She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning as 
she spoke, and looking across at him with earnest 
eyes, that begged him to believe her. She was 
saying the pure truth, but she did not know the 
force or the meaning of that truth. 

He listened with a smile; it was not new to 
him; he knew her heart much better than she 
knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness, 
and yet a strength, in the words that touched him 
though. 

He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her 
to leave off her spinning. 

“Some day I shall paint you with that wheel 
as I painted the Broodhuis. Will you let me, 
Bebee 

“Yes.” 

She answered him as she would have answered 
if he had told her to go on pilgrimage from one 
end of the Low Countries to the other. 

“ What were you going to do to-day ?” 

“ I am going into the market with the flowers ; 
I go every day.” 


152 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ How much will you make 

“ Two or three francs, if I am lucky.” 

“And do you never have a holiday?” 

“ Oh, yes ; but not often, you know, because it 
is on the f5te days that the people want the most 
flowers.” 

“ But in the winter ?” 

“ Then I work at the lace.” 

“ Do you never go into the woods ?” 

“I have been, once or twice; but it loses a 
whole day.” 

“You are afraid of not earning?” 

“Yes. Because I am afraid of owing people 
anything.” 

“ Well, give up this one day, and we will make 
holiday. The people are out ; they will not know. 
Come into the forest, and we will dine at a cafe in 
the woods ; and we will be as poetic as you like, 
and I will tell you a tale of one called Rosalind, 
who pranked herself in boy’s attire, all for love, in 
the Ardennes country yonder. Come, it is the 
very day for the forest; it will make me a lad 
again at Meudon, when the lilacs were in bloom. 
Poor Paris ! Come.” 

“Do you mean it?” 

The color was bright in her face, her heart was 
dancing, her little feet felt themselves already on 
the fresh green turf. 

She had no thought that there could be any 
harm in it. She would have gone with Jeannot or 
old Bac. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I53 

‘‘ Of course I mean it. Come. I was going to 
Mayence to see the Magi and Van Dyck’s Christ. 
We will go to Soignies instead, and study green 
leaves. I will paint your face by sunlight. It is 
the best way to paint you. You belong to the 
open air. So should Gretchen ; or how else should 
she have the blue sky in her eyes?” 

“ But I have only wooden shoes !” 

Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her feet ; 
he who had wanted to give her the silk stockings — 
how would he like to be seen walking abroad with 
those two clumsy, clattering, work-a-day, little 
sabots ? 

“ Hever mind. My dear, in my time I have had 
enough of satin shoes and of silver gilt heels; they 
click-clack as loud as yours, and cost much more 
to those who walk with them, not to mention that 
they will seldom deign to walk at all. Your 
wooden shoes are picturesque. Paganini made a 
violin out of a wooden shoe. Who knows what 
music may lurk in yours, only you have never 
heard it. Perhaps I have. It was Bac who gave 
you the red shoes that was the barbarian, not I. 
Come.” 

“ You really mean it ?” 

“ Come.” 

“ But they will miss me at market.” 

“ They will think you are gone on the pil- 
grimage: you need never tell them you have 
not.” 

But if they ask me ?” 


154 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

‘‘ Does it never happen that you say any other 
thing than the truth ?” 

“Any other thing than the truth! Of course 
not. People take for granted that one tells truth ; 
it would be very base to cheat them. Do you really 
mean that I may come ? — in the forest ! — and you 
will tell me stories like those you give me to 
read ?” 

“ I will tell you a better story. Lock your hut, 
Bebee, and come.” 

“And to think you are not ashamed!” 

“ Ashamed ?” 

*“ Yes, because of my wooden shoes.” 

Was it possible? Bebee thought, as she ran out 
into the garden and locked the door behind her, 
and pushed the key under the water-butt as usual, 
being quite content with that prudent precaution 
against robbers which had served Antoine all his 
days. Was it possible, this wonderful joy? — her 
cheeks were like her roses, her eyes had a brilliance 
like the sun ; the natural grace and mirth of the 
child blossomed in a thousand ways and ges- 
tures. 

As she went by the shrine in the wall, she bent 
her knee a moment and made the sign of the cross ; 
then she gathered a little moss-rose that nodded 
close under the border of the palisade, and turned 
and gave it to him. 

“Look, she sends you this. She is not angry, 
you see, and it is much more pleasure when she is 
pleased — do you not know ?” 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


155 


He shrank a little as her fingers touched him. 

“ What a pity you had no mother, Bebee !” he 
said, on an impulse of emotion, of which in Paris 
he would have been more ashamed than of any 
guilt. 



CHAPTER XV. 



X the deserted lane by the swans’ water, 
under the willows, the horses waited to 
take him to Mechlin ; little, quick, rough 
horses, with round brass bells, in the Flemish fash- 
ion, and gay harness, and a low char-^-banc, in 
which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a painter’s 
many necessities, were tossed together. 

He lifted her in, and the little horses flew fast 
through the green country, ringing chimes at each 
step, till they plunged into the deep glades of the 
woods of Cambre and Soignies. 

Bebee sat breathless with delight. 

She had never gone behind horses in all her life, 
except once or twice in a wagon when the tired 
teamsters had dragged a load of corn across the 
plains, or when the miller’s old gray mare had hob- 
bled wearily before a cart-load of noisy, happy, mis- 
chievous children going home from the masses and 
fairs, and flags, and flowers, and church banners, 
and puppet-shows, and lighted altars, and whirling 
merry-go-rounds of the Fete Dieu. 

She had never known what it was to sail as on the 
wings of the wind along broad roads, with yellow 
156 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


157 


wheat-lands, and green hedges, and wayside trees, 
and little villages, and reedy canal-water, all flying 
by her to the sing-song of the joyous bells. 

‘‘ Oh, how good it is to live !’* she cried, clapping 
her hands in a very ecstasy, as the clear morning 
broadened into gold and the west wind rose and 
blew from the sands by the sea. 

“ Yes — it is good — if one did not tire so soon,” 
said he, watching her with a listless pleasure. 

But she did not hear ; she was beyond the reach 
of any power to sadden her ; she was watching the 
white oxen that stood on the purple brow of the 
just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew 
like a shower of apple-blossoms across the sky to 
the south. 

There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of 
the harvest-fleld that looked black against the blue 
sky ; its shadow fell across the road, but she did 
not see it : she was looking at the sun. 

There is not much change in the great Soignies 
woods. They are aisles on aisles of beautiful green 
trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark 
foliage that look endless ; long avenues of beech, 
of oak, of elm, or of flr, with the bracken and the 
brushwood growing dense between; a delicious 
forest-growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and 
by a little past midday dusky as evening ; with the 
forest fragrance, sweet and dewy, all about, and 
under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the 
white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the 
wings of birds. 

14 • 


158 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black 
Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor 
sovereign of two historic streams like the brave 
woods of Heidelberg ; nor wild and romantic, and 
broken with black rocks, and poetized by the shade 
of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect river, 
like its neighbors of Ardennes ; nor throned aloft 
on mighty mountains like the majestic oak-glades 
of the Swabian hills of the ivory-carvers. 

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, 
throwing its shadow over corn-fields and cattle 
pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no won- 
ders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful 
forest for all that. 

It has only green leaves to give — green leaves 
always, league after league ; but there is about it 
that vague mystery which all forests have, and 
this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan 
might dwell in it, and St. Hubert, and John Keats. 

Bebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac chil- 
dren or with Jeannot’s sisters, had never pene- 
trated farther than the glades of the Cambre, and 
had never entered the heart of the true forest, 
which is much still what it must have been in the 
old days when the burghers of Brabant cut their 
yew bows and their pike-staves from it to use 
against the hosts of Spain. 

To Bebee it was as an enchanted land, and every 
play of light and shade, every hare speeding across 
the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves, every 
little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I59 

thickets, was to her a treasure, a picture, a poem, 
a delight. 

He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vin- 
cennes and of Versailles in the student days of 
his youth ; little work-girls fresh from chalets of 
the Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, 
who had brought their poor little charms to perish 
in Paris ; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and 
amidst the gilded shop-signs till they were as pale 
and thin as their own starved balsams ; and who, 
when they saw the green woods, laughed and 
cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept 
fields, and wished that they were back again be- 
hind their drove of cows, or weeding among the 
green grapes. 

But those little work-girls had been mere homely 
daisies, and daisies already with the dust of the 
pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon them. 

Bebee was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet 
dog-roses that she found in the thickets of thorn. 

He had meant to treat her as he had used to do 
those work-girls — a little wine, a little wooing, a 
little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly and brief 
as a rainbow — one midsummer day and night — 
then a handful of gold, a caress, a good-morrow, 
and forgetfulness ever afterwards — that was what 
he had meant when he had brought her out to tha 
forest of Soignies. 

But — she was different, this child. 

He made the great sketch of her for his Gret- 
chen, sitting on a moss-ground trunk, with mar- 


160 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


guerites in her hand ; he sent for their breakfast 
far into the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth 
into early peaches and costly sweatmeats ; he wan- 
dered with her hither and thither, and told her 
tales out of the poets and talked to her in the 
dreamy, cynical, poetical manner that was charac- 
teristic of him, being half artificial and half sorrow- 
ful, as his temper was. 

But Bebee — all unconscious, intoxicated with 
happiness, and yet touched by it into that vague 
sadness which the summer sun brings with it even 
to young things, if they have soul in them ; — 
Bebee said to him what the work-girls of Paris 
never had done. 

Beautiful things : things fantastic, ignorant, ab- 
surd, very simple, very unreasonable oftentimes, 
but things beautiful always, and sometimes even 
very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a 
certain light divine that does shine now and then 
as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that 
have no grossness to obscure them. 

Her words were not equal to tbe burden of her 
thoughts at times, but he knew how to take the 
pearl of the thought from the broken shell and 
tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech. 

“ If there be a God anywhere,’’ he thought to 
himself, “ this little Fleming is very near him.” 

She was so near that although he had no belief 
in any God, he could not deal with her as he had 
used to do with the work-girls in the primrose 
paths of old Vincennes. 



CHAPTER XVL 



0 be Gretchen, you must count the leaves 
of your daisies,” he said to her, as he 
painted — painted her just as she was, 
with her two little white feet in the wooden shoes, 
and the thick, green leaves behind ; the simplest 
picture possible, the dress of gray — only cool dark 
gray — with white linen bodice, and no color any- 
where except in the green of the foliage ; but where 
he meant the wonder and the charm of it to lie was 
in the upraised, serious, child-like face, and the gaze 
of the grave, smiling eyes. 

It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open air 
among the flowers. Gretchen, with the tall dog- 
daisies growing up about her feet, among the thyme 
and the roses, before she had had need to gather 
one to ask her future of its parted leaves. 

The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale ; she is a 
fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant, 
with whom neither angels nor devils have anything 
to do, and whose eyes never can open to either hell 
or heaven. But the Gretchen of Flamen said much 
more than this : looking at it, men would sigh from 
shame, and women weep from sorrow. 

14 * L 


161 


162 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

‘‘ Count the daisies echoed Bebee. “ Oh, J 
know what you mean. A little — much — passion 
ately — until death — not at all. What the girls say 
when they want to see if any one loves them ? Is 
that it ?” 

She looked at him without any consciousness — 
except as she loved the flowers. 

“ Do you think the daisies know she went on, 
seriously, parting their petals with her fingers. 
“ Flowers do know many things — that is certain.” 

“ Ask them for yourself.” 

“ Ask them what ?” 

“ How much — any one — loves you ?” 

“ Oh, but every one loves me ; there is no one 
that is bad. Antoine used to say to me, ‘ Never 
think of yourself, Bebee; always think of other 
people, so every one will love you.’ And I always 
try to do that, and every one does.” 

“ But that is not the love the daisy tells of to your 
sex.” 

“No?” 

“ No ; the girls that you see count the flowers — 
they are thinking, not of all the village, but of 
some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls 
across theirs in the moonlight ! You know that ?” 

“ Ah, yes — and they marry afterwards — ^yes.” 

She said it softly, musingly, with no embarrass- 
ment ; it was an unreal, remote thing to her, and 
yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague trouble 
that was infinitely sweet. 

There is little talk of love in the lives of the 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 103 

poor; they have no space for it; love to them 
means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes 
to buy, more hands to dive into the meagre bag 
of coppers. 'Now and then a girl of the commune 
had been married, and had gone out just the same 
the next day to her plowing in the fields or to 
her lace-weaving in the city. Bebee had thought 
little of it. 

“ They marry or they do not marry. That is as 
it may be,” said Flamen, with a smile. “ Bebee, 
I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a 
love-dial of the daisies. What is the story ? Oh, 
I have told you stories enough. Gretchen’s you 
would not understand, just yet.” 

“But what did the daisies say to her ?” 

“My dear, the daisies always say the same 
thing, because daisies always tell the truth and 
know men. The daisies always say ‘ a little it 
is the girl’s ear that tricks her, and makes her 
hear ‘ till death,’ — a folly and falsehood of which 
the daisy is not guilty.” 

“ But who says it if the daisy do not ?” 

“ Ah, the devil perhaps — who knows ? He has 
so much to do in these things.” 

But Bebee did not smile; she had a look of 
horror in her blue eyes ; she belonged to a peas- 
antry who believed in exorcising the fiend by the 
aid of the cross, and who not so very many gener- 
ations before had driven him out of human bodies 
by rack and fiame. 

She looked with a little wistful fear on the 


164 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her 
lap. 

“ Do you think the fiend is in these ?” she whis- 
pered, with awe in her voice. 

Flamen smiled. ‘‘When you count them he 
will be there, no doubt.” 

Bebee threw them with a shudder on the grass. 

“ Have I spoilt your holiday, dear ?” he said, 
with a certain self-reproach. 

She was silent a minute, then she gathered up 
the daisies again, and stroked them and put them 
to her lips. 

“It is not they that do wrong. You say the 
girls’ ears deceive them. It is the girls who want 
a lie and will not believe a truth because it hum- 
bles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not 
the daisies. As for me, I will not ask the daisies 
anything ever, so the fiend will not enter into 
them.” 

“ Hor into you. Poor little Bebee !” 

“ Why, you pity me for that ?” 

“ Yes. Because, if women never see the serpent*s 
face, neither do they ever scent the smell of the 
paradise roses ; and it will be hard for you to die 
without a single rose d’amour in your pretty breast, 
poor little Bebee ?” 

“I do not understand. But you frighten me a 
little.” 

He rose and left his easel and threw himself at 
her feet on the grass ; he took the little wooden 
shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 165 

taken the broidered shoes of a duchess ; he looked 
up at her with tender, smiling eyes. 

“Poor little Bebee!’’ he said again. “Did I 
frighten you indeed ? Nay, that was very base of 
me. We will not spoil our summer holiday. There 
is no such thing as a fiend, my dear. There are 
only men — such as I am. Say the daisy spell over 
for me, Bebee. See if I do not love you a little, 
just as you love your flowers.” 

She smiled, and the happy laughter came again 
over her face. 

“ Oh, I am sure you care for me a little,” she 
said, softly, “ or you would not be so good and get 
me books and give me pleasure ; and I do not want 
the daisies to tell me that, because you say it your- 
self, which is better.” 

“ Much better,” he answered her dreamily, and 
lay there in the grass, holding the little wooden 
shoes in his hands. 

He was not in love with her. He was in no 
haste. He preferred to play with her softly, slowly, 
as one separates the leaves of a rose, to see the deep 
rose of its heart. 

Her own ignorance of what she felt had a charm 
for him. He liked to lift the veil from her eyes by 
gentle degrees, watching each new pulse-beat, each 
fresh instinct tremble into life. 

It was an old, old story to him ; he knew each 
chapter and verse to weariness, though there still 
was no other story that he still read as often. But 
to her it was so new. 


166 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


To him it was a long beaten track ; he knew 
every turn of it ; he recognized every wayside blos- 
som; he had passed over a thousand times each 
tremulous bridge; he knew so well beforehand 
where each shadow would fall, and where each 
fresh bud would blossom, and where each harvest 
would be reaped. 

But to her it was so new. 

She followed him as a blind child a man that 
guides her through a garden and reads her a wonder 
tale. 

He was good to her, that was all she knew. 
When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a 
happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that 
she could have wished to die in it. 

And in her humility and her ignorance she won- 
dered always how he — so great, so wise, so beauti- 
ful — could have thought it ever worth his while to 
leave the paradise of Kubes’ land to wait with her 
under her little rush-thatched roof, and bring her 
here to see the green leaves and the living things 
of the forest. 

As they went, a man was going under the trees 
with a load of wood upon his back. Bebee gave a 
little cry of recognition. 

“ Oh, look, that is Jeannot ! How he will won- 
der to see me here 

Flamen drew her a little downward, so that the 
forester passed onward without perceiving them. 

“ Why do you do that ?” said Bebee. “ Shall I 
not speak to him 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 107 

“ Why ? To have all your neighbors chatter of 
your feast in the forest ? It is not worth while.” 

“Ah, but I always tell them everything,” said 
Bebee, whose imagination had been already busy 
with the wonders that she would unfold to Mere 
Krebs and the Varnhart children. 

“ Then you will see but little of me, my dear. 
Learn to be silent, Bebee. It is a woman’s first 
duty, though her hardest.” 

“ Is it?” 

She did not speak for some time. She could 
not imagine a state of things in which she would 
not narrate the little daily miracles of her life to 
the good old garrulous women and the little open- 
mouthed romps. And yet — she lifted her eyes to 
his. 

“I am glad you have told me that,” she said. 
“ Though indeed, I do not see why one should not 
say what one does, yet — somehow— I do not like 
to talk about you. It is like the pictures in the 
galleries, and the music in the cathedral, and the 
great still evenings, when the fields are all silent, 
and it is as if Christ walked abroad in them ; — 1 
do not know how to talk of those things to the 
others — only to you — and I do not like to talk 
about you to them — do you not know ?” 

“ Yes, I know. But what alfinity have I, Bebee, 
to your thoughts of your God walking in His corn- 
fields ?” 

Bebee’s eyes glanced down through the green 
aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness in 


168 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 

them that was like the child-angels of Botticelli’s 
dreams. 

“ I cannot tell you very well. But when I am 
in the fields at evening and think of Christ, I feel 
so happy, and of such good will to all the rest, 
and I seem to see heaven quite plain through the 
beautiful gray air where the stars are — and so I 
feel when I am with you — that is all. Only ” 

“ Only what ?” 

“ Only in those evenings, when I was all alone, 
heaven seemed up there, where the stars are, and 
I longed for wings; but now, it is here — and I 
would only shut my wings if I had them, and not 
stir.” 

He looked at her, and took her hands and kissed 
them — but reverently — as a believer may kiss a 
shrine. In that moment to Flamen she was sacred; 
in that moment he could no more have hurt her 
with passion than he could have hurt her with a 
blow. 

It was an emotion with him, and did not endure. 
But whilst it lasted, it was true. 



CHAPTER XVIL 

H HEH he took her to dine at one of the 
wooden cafes under the trees. There was 
a little sheet of water in front of it, and a 
gay garden around. There was a balcony and a 
wooden stairway ; there were long trellised arbors, 
and little white tables, and great rose-bushes, like 
her own at home. They had an arbor all to them- 
selves ; a cool sweet-smelling bower of green, with 
a glimpse of scarlet from the flowers of some twist- 
ing beans. 

They had a meal, the like of which she had 
never seen ; such a huge melon in the centre of it, 
and curious wines, and coflfee or cream in silver 
pots, or what looked like silver to her — “just like 
the altar- vases in the church,” she said to herself. 

“If only the Varnhart children were here!” she 
cried ; but he did not echo the wish. 

It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on 
the little bit of water. On the other side of the 
garden some one was playing a guitar. Under 
a lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying 
Higher ! higher ! at each toss. 

In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long 
15 169 


170 


TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


table, there was a noisy party of students and girls 
of the city ; their laughter was mellowed by dis- 
tance as it came over the breadth of the garden, 
and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish voices, 
songs from an opera-bouffe of La Monnaie. 

It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant. 

There was everywhere about an air of light- 
hearted enjoyment. Bebee sat with a wondering 
look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural 
instincts of her youth, that were like curled -up 
fruit-buds in her, unclosed softly to the light of 

joy. 

“ Is life always like this in your Kubes’ land V 
she asked him; that vague far-away country of 
which she never asked him anything more definite, 
and which yet was so clear before her fancy. 

“ Yes,” he made answer to her. “ Only — instead 
of those leaves, flowers and pomegranates ; and in 
lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes are 
esteemed like king’s jewels; and in place of those 
little green arbors, great white palaces, cool and 
still, with ilex woods and orange groves and sap- 
phire seas beyond them. Would you like to come 
there, Bebee ? — and wear laces such as you weave, 
and hear singing and laughter all night long, and 
never work any more in the mould of the garden, 
or spin any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any 
more out in the wind, and the rain, and the winter 
mud to the market ?” 

Bebee listened, leaning her round elbows on 
the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


171 


a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But the 
sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had 
chosen, passed by her. 

It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the 
woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The bird 
is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morn 
ing dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the 
blossoms of the wind-tossed pear-boughs ; the gem, 
though it be a monarch’s, will only strike hard and 
tasteless on its beak. 

“ I would like to see it all,” said Bebee, musingly 
trying to follow out her thoughts. “ But as for the 
garden-work and the spinning — that I do not want 
to leave, because I have done it all my life ; and I 
do not think I should care to wear lace — it would 
tear very soon ; one would be afraid to run ; and 
do you see I know how it is made — all that lace. 
I know how blind the eyes get over it, and how the 
hearts ache ; I know how the old women starve, 
and the little children cry ; I know that there is 
not a sprig of it that is not stitched with pain ; the 
great ladies do not think, I dare say, because they 
have never worked at it or watched the others; 
but I have. And so, you see, I think if I wore 
it I should feel sad, and if a nail caught on it I 
should feel as if it were tearing the flesh of my 
friends. Perhaps I say it badly — but that is what I 
feel.” 

“ You do not say it badly — ^you speak well, for 
you speak from the heart,” he answered her, and 
felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with 


172 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


the gold and purple of a baser world than any that 
she knew. 

“ And yet you want to see new lands ?” he pur 
sued. “ What is it you want to see there ?” 

“Ah, quite other things than these,” cried Beb^e, 
still leaning her cheeks on her hands. “ That 
dancing and singing is very pretty and merry, but 
it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the 
children skip. This wine, you tell me, is some- 
thing very great — but fresh milk is much nicer, I 
think. It is not these kind of things I want — I 
want to know all about the people who lived before 
us ; I want to know what the stars are, and what 
the wind is ; I want to know where the lark goes 
when you lose him out of sight against the sun ; 
I want to know how the old artists got to see God, 
that they could paint him and all his angels as they 
have done ; I want to know how the voices got into 
the bells, and how they can make one’s heart beat, 
hanging up there as they do, all alone among the 
jackdaws ; I want to know what it is when I walk 
in the fields in the morning, and it is all gray and 
soft and still, and the corn-crake cries in the 
wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, 
that makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if 
I were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and 
such a little thing; because you see the mouse 
she has her hole, and the crake her own people, 
but I ” 

Her voice faltered a little and stopped : she had 
never before thought out into words her own lone- 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 173 

liness ; from the long green arbor the voices of the 
girls and the students sang — 

“ Ah ! le doux son d’un baiser tendre!” 

Flamen was silent. The poet in him — and in 
an artist there is always more or less of the poet — 
kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to 
pity and respect. 

They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had 
little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in 
their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously 
as a man very base and callous may at times be 
moved by the look in a dying deer’s eyes, or by the 
sound of a song that some lost love once sang. 

He rose and drew her hands away, and took her 
small face between his own hands instead. 

“ Poor little Bebee !” he said gently, looking 
down on her with a breath that was almost a sigh. 
“ Poor little Bebee ! — to envy the corn-crake and 
the mouse !” 

She was a little startled ; her cheeks grew very 
warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still 
into his without fear. 

He stooped and touched her forehead with his 
lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently ; 
she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up 
to the light gold ripples of her hair ; she trembled 
a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed 
nor yet ashamed ; she was too simple of heart to 
feel the fear that is born of passion and of con- 
sciousness. 

15 * 


174 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who 
was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs 
people in the villages with a little green cart and 
a yellow dog — no more. 

And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse 
of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and 
the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear 
and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because 
of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that 
seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea 
wave bears a young child off its feet. 

“ You do not feel alone now, Bebee ?” he whis- 
pered to her. 

“Ko !” she answered him softly under her breath, 
and sat still, while all her body quivered like a 
leaf. 

Ko ; how could she ever be alone now that this 
sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in 
memory upon her ; how could she wish ever again 
now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or 
the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn ? 

At that moment a student went by past the 
entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his 
loins and a paper feather in his cap ; he was play- 
ing a fife and dancing ; he glanced in as he went. 

“ It is time to go home, Bebee,” said Flamen. 



CHAPTER XYIIL 

it came to pass that Bebee’s day in the 
big forest came and went as simply almost 
as any day that she had played away with 
the Yarnhart children under the beech shadows of 
Camhre woods. 

And when he took her to her hut at sunset before 
the pilgrims had returned there was a great be- 
wildered tumult of happiness in her heart, but 
there was no memory with her that prevented her 
from looking at the shrine in the wall as she passed 
it, and saying with a quick gesture of the cross on 
brow and bosom, — 

“Ah, dear Holy Mother — how good you have 
been ! and I am back again, you see, and I will 
work harder than ever because of all this joy that 
you have given me.” 

And she took another moss-rose and changed it 
for that of the morning, which was faded, and said 
to Flamen, — 

“ Look — she sends you this. How do you know 
what I mean ? One is more content when She is 
content.” 

He did not answer, but he held her hands 

175 


176 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


against him a moment as they fastened in the 
rosebud. 

“Not a word to the pilgrims, Bebee — you re- 
member ?” 

“ Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them every 
time I pray — it will be like being silent about that 
— it will be no more wrong than that.” 

But there was a touch ot anxiety in the words ; 
she was not quite certain ; she wanted to be re- 
assured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him : 
but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any 
secret from the people who had been about her 
from her birth. 

He did not reassure her ; her anxiety was pretty 
to watch, and he left the trouble in her heart like 
a bee in the chalice of a lily. Besides, the little 
wicket-gate was between them; he was musing 
whether he would push it open once more. 

Her fate was in the balance, though she did not 
dream it : he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly, 
sacredly all that day — almost as much so as stupid 
Jeannot could have done. He had been touched 
by her trust in him, and by the unconscious beauty 
of her fancies, into a mood that was unlike all his 
life and habits. But after all, he said to himself — 

After all ! — 

Where he stood in the golden evening he saw 
the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eyes, the 
little brown hands that still tried to fasten the rose- 
bud, the young peach-like skin where the wind 
stirred the bodice ; — she was only a little Flemish 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 177 

peasant, this poor little Bebee, a little thing of the 
fields and the streets, for all the dreams of God 
that abode with her. After all — soon or late — the 
end would be always the same. What matter ! 

She would weep a little to-morrow, and she would 
not kneel any more at the shrine in the garden 
wall; and then — and then — she would stay here 
and marry the good boor Jeannot, just the same 
after awhile ; or drift away after him to Paris, and 
leave her two little wooden shoes, and her visions 
of Christ in the fields at evening, behind her for 
evermore, and do as all the others did, and take not 
only silken stockings but the Cinderella slipper 
that is called Gold, which brings all other good 
things in its train ; — what matter ! 

He had meant this from the first, because she 
was so pretty, and those little wooden sabots ran 
so lithely over the stones ; though he was not in 
love with her, but only idly stretched his hand for 
her as a child by instinct stretches to a fruit that 
hangs in the sun a little rosier and a little nearer 
than the rest. 

What matter — he said to himself— she loved him, 
poor little soul, though she did not know it — and 
there would always he Jeannot glad enough of a 
handful of bright French gold. 

He pushed the gate gently against her ; her hands 
fastened the rosebud and drew open the latch them- 
selves. 

“ Will you come in a little ?” she said, with the 
happy light in her face. “ Yon must not stay long, 

M 


178 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


because the flowers must be watered, and then 
there are Annemie’s patterns — they must be done 
or she will have no money and so no food — but if 
you would come in for a little ? And see — if you 
wait a minute I will show you the roses that I shall 
cut to-morrow the first thing, and take down to St. 
Guido to Our Lady’s altar in thank- oflTering for 
to-day. I should like you to choose them — ^you 
yourself — and if you would just touch them I should 
feel as if you gave them to her too. Will you ?” 

She spoke with the pretty outspoken frankness 
of her habitual speech, just tempered and broken 
with the happy, timid hesitation, the curious sense 
at once of closer nearness and of greater distance, 
that had come on her since he had kissed her 
among the bright bean-flowers. 

He turned from her quickly. 

Ho, dear — no. Gather your roses alone, Bebee 
— if I touch them their leaves will fall.” 

Then, with a hurriedly backward glance down 
the dusky lane to see that none were looking, he 
bent his head and kissed her again quickly and 
with a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind 
him and went away through the boughs and the 
shadows. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



|EBEE looked after him wistfully till hia 
figure was lost in the gloom. 

The village was very quiet ; a dog bark- 
ing afar ohT and a cow lowing in the meadow were 
the only living things that made their presence 
heard ; the pilgrims had not returned. 

She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that in- 
distinct, dreamy happiness which is the prerogative 
of innocent love. 

“How wonderful it is that he should give a 
thought to me !” she said again and again to her- 
self. It was as if a king had stooped for a little 
knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown where 
the great diamonds should be. 

She did not reason. She did not question. She 
did not look beyond that hour — such is the privi- 
lege of youth. 

“ How I will read ! How I will learn ! How 
wise I will try to be ; and how good, if I can !” 
she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under 
her weight, and looking with glad eyes at the 
goats as they frisked with their young in the pas- 
ture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one 

179 


180 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from 
the palace-woods, and the frogs croaked good-nights 
in the rushes. 

Then, like a little day-laborer as she was, with 
the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon 
her from her birth up, she shut down the latch of 
the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and 
went to the well to draw its nightly draught for the 
dry garden. 

‘‘ Oh, dear roses she said to them as she rained 
the silvery showers over their nodding heads. “ Oh, 
dear roses ! — tell me — was ever anybody so happy 
as I am ? Oh, if you say ‘ yes’ I shall tell you 
you lie; silly flowers that were only born yester- 
day !” 

But the roses shook the water ofi’ them in the 
wind, and said, as she wished them to say, — 

“ No — no one — ever before, Bebee — no one ever 
before.” 

For roses, like everything else upon earth, only 
speak what our own heart puts into them. 

An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, 
who was too ailing and aged to make one of the 
pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving 
form, grayish white in the starlight, with the dark 
copper vessel balanced on her head, going to and 
fro betwixt the well and the garden. 

“ You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little 
one !” he said across the sweet-brier hedge. “Nay, 
that was too bad ; work, work, work — thy pretty 
back should not be bent double yet. You want 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


181 


a holiday, Bebee ; well, the Fete Dieu is near. 
Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a 
few sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds. 
You sit dull in the market all day; you want a 
feast.” 

Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in and 
brought three new-laid eggs that she had left in the 
flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust them on 
^ him through a break in the brier. It was the first 
time she had ever done anything of which she 
might not speak; she was ashamed, and yet the 
secret was so sweet to her. 

“ I am very happy, Jehan, thank God !” she 
murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine 
in her eyes that the old man’s ears and sight were 
too dull to discern. 

“ So was sAe,” muttered Jehan, as he thrust the 
eggs into his old patched blue blouse. “ So was 
she. And then a stumble — a blow in the lane 
there — a horse’s kick — and all was over. All over, 
my pretty one — for ever and ever.” 



CHAPTER XX. 


X a sudden impulse Flamen, going through 
the woodland shadows to the city, paused 
and turned back; all his impulses were 
quick, and swayed him now hither now thither in 
many contrary ways. 

He knew that the hour was come — that he must 
leave her and spare her, as to himself he phrased 
it, or teach her the love words that the daisies 
whisper to women. 

And why not? — any way she would marry 
Jeannot. 

He, half-way to the town, walked back again and 
paused a moment at the gate ; an emotion half 
pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him. 

Anyway he would leave her in a few days ; Paris 
had again opened her arms to him; his old life 
awaited him ; women who claimed him by impe- 
rious amorous demands reproached him ; ana after 
all this day he had got the Gretchen of his ideal, a 
great picture for the future of his fame. 

As he would leave her anyway so soon, he would 
leave her unscathed — poor little field-flower — he 
182 




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 183 

could never take it with him to blossom or wither 
in Paris. 

His world would laugh too utterly if he made for 
himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in two 
wooden shoes. Besides — 

Besides, something that was half weak and half 
noble moved him not to lead this child, in her 
trust and her ignorance, into ways that when she 
awakened from her trance would seem to her 
shameful and full of sorrow. For he knew that 
Bebee was not as others are. 

He turned back and knocked at the hut door and 
opened it. 

Bebee was just beginning to undress herself; she 
had taken off* her white kerchief and her wooden 
shoes; her pretty shoulders and her little neck 
shone white in the moon ; her feet were bare on 
the mud floor. 

She started with a cry and threw the handker- 
chief again on her shoulders, but there was no fear 
of him ; only the unconscious instinct of her girl- 
hood. 

He thought for a moment that he would not go 
away until the morrow . 

“ Did you want me ?” said Bebee softly, with 
happy eyes of surprise and yet a little startled, 
fearing some evil might have happened to him 
that he should have returned thus. 

“Ho; I do not want you, dear,’’ he said gently; 
no — he did not want her, poor little soul ; she 
wanted him, but he — there were so many of these 


184 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


things in his life, and he liked her too well to love 
her. 

“ No, dear, I did not want you,” said Flamen, 
drawing her arms about him, and feeling her 
flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight came 
in through the green leaves and fell in fanciful 
patterns on the floor. “ But I came to say — you 
have had one happy day, wholly happy, have you 
not, poor little Bebee ?” 

“ Ah, yes !” she sighed rather than said the an- 
swer in her wondrous gladness ; drawn there close 
to him, with the softness of his lips upon her. 
Could he have come back only to ask that ? 

“Well, that is something. You will remember 
it always, Bebee?” he murmured in his uncon- 
scious cruelty. “I did not wish to spoil your 
cloudless pleasure, dear — for you care for me a 
little, do you not? — so I came back to tell you 
only now that I go away for a little while to- 
morrow.” 

“ Go away !” 

She trembled in his arms and turned cold as ice ; 
a great terror and darkness fell upon her ; she had 
never thought that he would ever go away. He 
caressed her, and played with her as a boy maj 
with a bird before he wrings its neck. 

“You will come back?” 

He kissed her : — “ Surely.” 

“ To-morrow ?” 

“ Nay — not so soon.” 

“ In a week ?” 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 185 

‘‘ Hardly.’’ 

“ In a month, then ?” 

“ Perhaps.” 

“ Before winter, anyway ?” 

He looked aside from the beseeching, tearful, 
candid eyes, and kissed her hair and her throat, 
and said, “ Yes, dear — beyond a doubt.” 

She clung to him, crying silently — he wished 
that women would not weep. 

“ Come, Bebee, listen,” he said coaxingly, think- 
ing to break the bitterness to her. “ This is not 
wise, and it gives me pain. There is so much for 
you to do. You know so little. There is so much 
to learn. I will leave you many books, and you must 
grow quite learned in my absence. The Virgin is 
all very well in her way, but she cannot teach us 
much, poor lady. For her kingdom is called Igno- 
rance. You must teach yourself. I leave you that 
to do. The days will go by quickly if you are labo- 
rious and patient. Do you love me, little one ?” 

For an answer she kissed his hand. 

“ You are a busy little Bebee always,” he said, 
with his lips caressing her soft brown arms that 
were round his neck. “ But you must be busier 
than ever whilst I am gone. So you will forget. 
Ho, no, I do not mean that : — I mean so the time 
will pass quickest. And I shall finish your picture, 
Bebee, and all Paris will see you, and the great 
ladies will envy the little girl with her two wooden 
shoes. Ah ! that does not please you ? — you care 
for none of these vanities. No. Poor little Bebee, 
16 * 


186 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


why did God make you, or Chance breathe life into 
you ? You are so far away from us all. It was cruel. 
What harm has your poor little soul ever done that, 
pure as a flower, it should have been sent to the 
hell of this world?” 

She clung to him, sobbing without sound. “You 
will come back? You will come back?” she 
moaned, clasping him closer and closer. 

Flamen’s own eyes grew dim. But he lied to 
her : — “ I will — I promise.” 

It was so much easier to say so, and it would 
break her sorrow. So he thought. 

For the moment again he was tempted to take 
her with him — but, he resisted it — he would tire, 
and she would cling to him forever. 

There was a long silence. The bleating of the 
little kid in the shed without was the only sound ; 
the gray lavender blew to and fro. 

Her arms were close about his throat ; he kissed 
them again, and kissed her eyes, her cheek, her 
mouth ; then put her from him quickly and went 
out. 

She ran to him, and threw herself on the damp 
ground and held him there, and leaned her fore- 
head on his feet. But though he looked at her 
with wet eyes, he did not yield, and he still 
said, — 

“I will come back soon — very soon — be quiet, 
dear, let me go.” 

Then he kissed her once more many times, and 
put her gently within the door and closed it. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 187 

A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to 
his heart, but he did not turn ; he went on through 
the wet, green little garden, and the curling leaves, 
where he had found peace and had left deso- 
lation. 


CHAPTER XXL 



WILL let her alone and she will marry 
Jeannot,” thought Flamen; and he be- 
lieved himself a good man for once in 
his life, and pitied himself for having become a 
sentimentalist. 

She would marry Jeannot, and bear many chil- 
dren, as those people always did ; and ruddy little 
peasants would cling about those pretty, soft, little 
breasts of hers; and she would love them after 
the manner of such women, and be very content 
clattering over the stones in her wooden shoes; 
and growing brown and stout, and more careful 
after money, and ceasing to dream of unknown 
things, and not seeing God at all in the fields, 
but looking low and beholding only the ears of 
the gleaning wheat and the feet of the tottering 
children; and so gaining her bread, and losing 
her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth 
till she dropped into it like one of her own wind- 
blown wall-fiowers when the bee has sucked out 
all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up 
all its bloom : — yes, of course, she would marry 
Jeannot and end so ! 






TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


189 


Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was 
the one great matter. 

So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and 
went on his way out of the chiming city as its 
matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain 
regret, and the only innocent affection that had 
ever awakened in him ; and thought of his self- 
negation with half admiration and half derision; 
and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his 
amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous, 
many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw 
the last line of the low green plains shine against 
the sun, — “She will marry Jeannot — of course, 
she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen is 
greater than Scheffer’s.’’ 

What else mattered very much, after all, except 
what they would say in Paris of Gretchen I 



CHAPTER XXIL 

B EOPLE saw that Bebee had grown very 
quiet. But that was all they saw. 

Her little face was pale as she sat among 
her glowing autumn blossoms, by the side of the 
cobbler’s stall; and when the Yarnhart children 
cried at the gate to her to come and play, she 
would answer gently that she was too busy to have 
play-time now. 

The fruit-girl of the Montague de la Cour hooted 
after her, “ Gone so soon ? — oh he ! what did I say? 
— a fine pine is sugar in the teeth a second only, 
but the brown nuts you may crack all the seasons 
round. Well, did you make good harvest while it 
lasted ? has Jeannot a fat bridal portion promised ?” 

And old Jehan, who was the tenderest soul of 
them all in the lane by the swans’ water, would 
come and look at her wistfully as she worked 
among the fiowers, and would say to her, — 

“Dear little one, there is some trouble — does it 
come of that painted picture? You never laugh 
now, Bebee, and that is bad. A girl’s laugh is 
pretty to hear; my girl laughed like little bells 
ringing — and then it stopped, all at once ; they said 
190 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


191 


she was dead. But you are not dead, Bebee. And 
yet you are so silent ; one would say you were.” 

But to the mocking of the fruit-girl, as to the 
tenderness of old Jehan, Bebee answered nothing; 
the lines of her pretty curled mouth grew grave 
and sad, and in her eyes there was a wistful be- 
wildered pathetic appeal like the look in the eyes 
of a beaten dog, which, while it aches with pain, 
does not cease to love its master. 

One resolve upheld her, and made her feet firm 
on the stones of the streets and her lips mute under 
all they said to her. She would learn all she could, 
and be good, and patient, and wise, if trying could 
make her wise, and so do his will in all things — 
until he should come back. 

‘‘You are not gay, Bebee,” said Annemie, who 
grew so blind that she could scarce see the flags at 
the mastheads, and who still thought that she 
pricked the lace patterns and earned her bread. 

“ You are not gay, dear. Has any lad gone to 
sea that your heart goes away with, and do you 
watch for his ship coming in with the coasters ? It 
is weary work waiting — but it is all the men think 
us fit for, child. They may set sail as they like ; 
every new port has new faces for them; but we are 
to sit still and to pray if we like, and never mur- 
mur, be the voyage ever so long, but be ready with 
a smile and a kiss, a fresh pipe of tobacco, and a 
dry pair of socks; — that is a man. We may have 
cried our hearts out — we must have ready the pipe 
and the socks, or, ‘ Is that what you call love ?’ they 


192 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


grumble. You want mortal patience if you love a 
man, — it is like a fretful child that thumps you 
when your breast is bare to it. Still — be you 
patient, dear, just as I am, just as I am.” 

And Bebee would shudder as she swept the cob- 
webs from the garret walls, — patient as she was — 
she who had sat here fifty years watching for a 
dead man and for a wrecked ship. 



CHAPTER XXIIL 


i^^HE wheat was reapen in the fields, and the 
I Pn earth turned afresh. The white and 

purple chrysanthemums bloomed against 
the flowerless rose-bushes, and the little gray Mich- 
aelmas daisy flourished where the dead carnations 
had spread their glories. Leaves began to fall 
and chilly winds to sigh among the willows ; the 
squirrels began to store away their nuts, and the 
poor to pick up the broken, bare boughs. 

He said he would come before winter,’’ thought 
Bebee, every day when she rose and felt each morn- 
ing cooler and grayer than the one before it ; winter 


was near. 

Her little feet already were cold in their wooden 
shoes; and the robin already sang in the twigs 
of the sear sweet-brier ; but she had the brave 
sweet faith which nothing kills, and she did not 
doubt — oh ! no, she did not doubt, she was only 
tired. 

Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights ; 
tired of the long, dull, empty days ; tired of watch- 
ing down the barren, leafless lane ; tired of hearken- 
ing breathless to each step on the rustling dead 
17 N 193 


194 


. TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


leaves ; tired of looking always, always, always, into 
the ruddy autumn evenings and the cold autumn 
starlight, and never hearing what she listened for, 
never seeing what she sought; tired as a child may 
be, lost in a wood, and wearily wearing its small 
strength and breaking its young heart in search 
of the track forever missed, of the home forever 
beyond the horizon. 

Still she did her work and kept her courage. 

She took her way into the town with her basket 
full of the ruby and amber of the dusky autumn 
blossoms, and when those failed, and the garden 
was quite desolate, except for a promise of haws 
and of holly, she went, as she had always done, 
to the lace-room, and gained her bread and the 
chickens’ corn each day by winding the thread 
round the bobbins ; and at nightfall, when she had 
plodded home through the darksome roads and 
over the sodden turf, and had lit her rushlight and 
sat down to her books, with her hand buried in 
her hair, and her eyes smarting from the strain of 
the lace-work, and her heart aching with that new 
and deadly pain which never left her now, she 
would read — read — read — read, and try and store 
her brain with knowledge, and try and grasp these 
vast new meanings of life that the books opened to 
her, and try and grow less ignorant against he 
should return. 

There was much she could not understand, but 
there was also much she could. 

Her mind was delicate and quick, her intelli- 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 195 

gence swift and strong ; she bought old books at 
bookstalls with pence that she saved by going with- 
out her dinner. The keeper of the stall, a shrewd 
old soul, explained some hard points to her, and 
chose good volumes for her, and lent others to this 
solitary little student in her wooden shoes and with 
her pale child’s face. 

So she toiled hard and learned much, and grew 
taller and very thin, and got a look in her eyes like 
a lost dog’s, and yet never lost heart or wandered 
in the task that he had set her, or in her faith in 
his return, 

“Burn the hooks, Bebee,” whispered the 
children again and again, clinging to her skirts. 
“ Burn the wicked, silent things. Since you have 
had them you never sing, or romp, or laugh, and 
you look so white — so white.” 

Bebee kissed them, but kept to her books. 

Jeannot going by from the forest night after 
night saw the light twinkling in the hut window, 
and sometimes crept softly up and looked through 
the chinks of the wooden shutter, and saw her 
leaning over some big old volume with her pretty 
brows drawn together, and her mouth shut close 
in earnest effort, and he would curse the man who 
had changed her so, and go away with rage in his 
breast and tears in his eyes, not daring to say any 
thing, but knowing that never would Bebee’s little 
brown hand lie in love within his own. 

JSTor even in friendship, for he had rashly spoken 
rough words against the stranger from Rubes’ 


196 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


land, and Bebee ever since then had passed him 
by with a grave simple greeting, and when he had 
brought her in timid gifts a barrow-load of fagots, 
had thanked him, but had bidden him take the 
wood home to his mother. 

“ You think evil things of me, Bebee ?” good 
Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice ; and 
she had answered gently, — 

“ No ; but do not speak to me, that is all.’^ 

Then he had cursed her absent lover, and Bebee 
gone within and closed her door. 

She had no idea that the people thought ill of 
her. They were cold to her, and such coldness 
made her heart ache a little more. But the one 
great love in her possessed her so strongly that all 
other things were half unreal. 

She did her daily housework from sheer habit, 
and she studied because he had told her to do it, 
and because with the sweet, stubborn, credulous 
faith of her youth, she never doubted that he would 
return. 

Otherwise there was no perception of real life in 
her ; she dreamed and prayed, and prayed and 
dreamed, and^ never ceased to do either one or the 
other, even when she was scattering potato-peels to 
the fowls, or shaking carrots loose of the soil, or 
sweeping the snow from her hut door, or going out 
in the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell 
of St. Guido tolled through the stillness for the 
first mass. 

For though even Father Francis looked angered 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


197 


at her because he thought she was stubborn, and 
hid some truth and some shame from him at con- 
fession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than 
ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky, crumbling old 
church, for it was all she could do for him who 
was absent — so she thought — and she did not feel 
quite so far away from him when she was be- 
seeching Christ to have care of his soul and of 
his body. 

All her pretty dreams were dead. 

She never heard any story in the robin’s song, 
or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or fancied 
that angels came about her in the night — never now. 

The fields were gray and sad; the birds were 
little brown things ; the stars were cold and far off ; 
the people she had used to care for were like mere 
shadows that went by her meaningless and without 
interest, and all she thought of was the one step 
that never came ; all she wanted was the one touch 
she never felt. 

“ You have done wrong, Bebee, and you will not 
own it,” said the few neighbors who ever spoke to 
her. 

Bebee looked at them with wistful, uncompre- 
hending eyes. 

“ I have done no wrong,” she said gently, but no 
one believed her. 

A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and 
thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She might have 
sinned as she had liked if she had been sensible 
after it, and married Jeannot. 

17 * 


198 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 


But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem 
as though she had done nothing — that was guilt 
indeed. 

For her village, in its small way, thought as the 
big world thinks. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 
winter came. 

he snow was deep, and the winds drove 
people with whips of ice along the 
dreary country roads and the steep streets of the 
city. The bells of the dogs and the mules sounded 
sadly through the white misty silence of the Flem- 
ish plains, and the weary horses slipped and fell on 
the frozen ruts and on the jagged stones in the little 
frost-shut Flemish towns. Still the Flemish folk 
were gay enough in many places. 

There were fairs and kermesses ; there were pup- 
pet-plays and church-feasts ; there were sledges on 
the plains and skates on the canals; there were 
warm woolen hoods and ruddy wood-fires ; there 
were tales of demons and saints, and bowls of hot 
onion soup; sugar images for the little children, 
and blessed beads for the maidens clasped on rosy 
throats with lovers’ kisses ; and in the city itself 
there was the high tide of the winter pomp and 
mirth, with festal scenes in the churches, and balls 
at the palaces, and all manner of gay things in toys 
and jewels, and music playing cheerily under the 
leafless trees, and flashes of scarlet cloth, and 

199 



200 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


shining fnrs, and happy faces, and golden curls, in 
the carriages that climbed the Montagne de la 
Cour, and filled the big place around the statue of 

stout Godfrey. 

In the little village above St. Guido, Bebee’s 
neighbors were merry too, in their simple way. 

The women worked away wearily at their lace 
in the dim winter light, and made a wretched living 
by it, but all the same they got penny playthings 
for their babies, and a bit of cake for their Sunday 
hearth. They drew together in homely and cordial 
friendship, and of an afternoon when dusk fell wove 
their lace in company in Mere Krebs’s mill-house 
kitchen, with the children and the dogs at their 
feet on the bricks, so that one big fire might serve 
for all, and all be lighted with one big rush candle, 
and all be beguiled by chit-chat and songs, stories 
of spirits, and whispers of ghosts, and now and then 
when the wind howled at its worst, a paternoster 
or two said in common for the men toiling in the 
barges or drifting up the Scheldt. 

In these gatherings Bebee’s face was missed, and 
the blithe soft sound of her voice, like a young 
thrush singing, was never heard. 

The people looked in, and saw her sitting over a 
great open book — often her hearth had no fire. 

Then the children grew tired of asking her to 
play ; and their elders began to shake their heads ; 
she was so pale and so quiet, there must be some 
evil in it — so they began to think. 

Little by little people dropped away from her. 


TIFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


201 


Who knew, the gossips said, what shame or sin the 
child might not have on her sick little soul ? 

True, Bebee worked hard just the same, and 
just the same was seen trudging to and fro in the 
dusk of dawns and afternoons in her two little 
wooden shoes. She was gentle and laborious, and 
gave the children her goat’s milk, and the old 
women the brambles of her garden. 

But they grew afraid of her — afraid of that sad, 
changeless, far-away look in her eyes, and of the 
mute weariness that was on her — and, being per- 
plexed, were sure, like all ignorant creatures, that 
what was secret must be also vile. 

So they hung aloof, and let her alone, and by- 
and-by scarcely nodded as they passed her, but said 
to Jeannot, — 

“You were spared a bad thing, lad; the child 
was that grand painter’s light-o’-love, that is plain 
to see. The mischief all comes of the stuff old 
Antoine filled her head with — a stray little by- 
blow of chickweed that he cockered up like a rare 
carnation. Oh ! do not fly in a rage, Jeannot ; the 
child is no good, and would have made an honest 
man rue. Take heart of grace, and praise the 
saints, and marry Katto’s Lisa.” 

But Jeannot would never listen to the slanderers, 
and would never look at Lisa, even though the 
door of the little hut was always closed against 
him, and whenever he met Bebee on the highway 
she never seemed to see him more than she saw 
the snow that her sabots were treading. 


202 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


One night in the midwinter-time old Annemie 
died. 

Bebee found her in the twilight with her head 
against the garret window, and her left side all 
shriveled and useless. She had a little sense left, 
and a few fleeting breaths to draw. 

“ Look for the brig,^’ she muttered. “ You will 
not see the flag at the masthead for the fog to- 
night ; but his socks are dry and his pipe is ready. 
Keep looking — keep looking — she will be in port 
to-night.” 

But her dead sailor never came into port ; she 
went to him. The poor, weakened, faithful old 
body of her was laid in the graveyard of the poor, 
and the ships came and went under the empty 
garret window, and Bebee was all alone. 

She had no more anything to work for, or any 
bond with the lives of others. She could live on 
the roots of her garden and the sale of her hens’ 
eggs, and she could change the turnips and carrots 
that grew in a little strip of her ground for the 
quantity of bread that she needed. 

So she gave herself up to the books, and drew 
herself more and more within from the outer 
world. She did not know that the neighbors 
thought very evil of her ; she had only one idea in 
her mind — to be more worthy of him against he 
should return. 

The winter passed away somehow ; she did not 
know how. 

It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen 


TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


203 


silence ; that was all. She studied hard, and had 
got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowledge 
out of her old books; her face had lost all its 
roundness and color, hut, instead, the forehead 
had gained breadth and the eyes had the dim fire 
of a student’s. 

Every night when she shut her volumes she 
thought, — 

“I am a little nearer him. I know a little 
more.” 

Just so every morning, when she bathed her 
hands in the chilly water, she thought to herself, 
“ I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that 
it may be like the ladies’ he has loved.” 

Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as 
a passion. Bebee’s was so. Like George Her- 
bert’s serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt 
away from a floor without doing it to the service 
of her lord. 

Only Bebee’s lord was a king of earth, made of 
earth’s dust and vanities. 

But what did she know of that ? 



CHAPTEE XXY. 



HE winter went by, and the snow-drops and 
crocus and pale bepatica smiled at her from 
the black clods. Every other spring-time 
Bebee had run with fleet feet under the budding 
trees down into the city, and had sold sweet little 
wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow 
was melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis. 

“ The winter is gone,’’ the townspeople used to 
say; “look, there is Bebee with the flowers.” 

But this year they did not see the little figure 
itself like a rosy crocus standing against the brown 
timbers of the Maison de Roi. 

Bebee had not heart to pluck a single blossom 
of them all. She let them all live, and tended 
them so that the little garden should look its best 
and brightest to him when his hand should lift its 
latch. 

Only he was so long coming — so very long ; the 
violets died away, and the first rosebuds came in 
their stead, and still Bebee looked every dawn and 
every nightfall vainly down the empty road. 

Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness 
of waiting. 

204 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


205 


Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass 
through, fire and water and storm will not appal 
them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but waiting 
— the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that 
drop one by one in their eternal sameness into the 
weary past, these kill slowly but surely, as the slow 
dropping of water frets away rock. 

The summer came. 

^Tearly a year had gone by. Bebee worked early 
and late. The garden bloomed like one big rose, 
and the neighbors shook their heads to see the 
flowers blossom and fall without bringing in a 
single coin. 

She herself spoke less seldom than ever, and 
now when old Jehan, who never had understood 
the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her what 
ailed her that she looked so pale and never stirred 
down to the city, now her courage failed her, and 
the tears brimmed over her eyes, and she could not 
call up a brave brief word to answer him. For 
the time was so long, and she was so tired. 

Still she never doubted that her lover would 
come back : he had said he would come : she was 
as sure that he would come as she was sure that 
God came in the midst of the people when the 
silver bell rang and the Host was borne by on 
high. 

Bebee did not heed much, but she vaguely felt 
the isolation she was left in : as a child too young 
to reason feels cold and feels hunger. 

“ Ho one wants me here now that Annemie is 

18 


206 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


gone,” she thought to herself, as the sweet green 
spring days unfolded themselves one by one like 
the buds of the brier-rose hedges. 

And now and then even the loyal little soul of 
her gave way, and sobbing on her lonely bed in 
the long dark nights, she would cry out against 
him, “ Oh, why not have left me alone ? I was so 
happy — so happy !” 

And then she would reproach herself with trea- 
son to him and ingratitude, and hate herself and 
feel guilty in her own sight to have thus sinned 
against him in thought for one single instant. 

For there are natures in which the generosity of 
love is so strong that it feels its own just pain to 
be disloyalty; and Bebee’s was one of them. And 
if he had killed her she would have died hoping 
only that no moan had escaped her under the blow 
that ever could accuse him. 

These natures, utterly innocent by force of self- 
accusation and self-abasement, suffer at once the 
torment of the victim and the criminal. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

day in the May weather she sat within- 
ors with a great book upon her table, 
t no sight for it in her aching eyes. The 
starling hopped to and fro on the sunny floor ; the 
bees boomed in the porch ; the tinkle of sheep’s 
bells came in on the stillness. All was peaceful 
and happy except the little weary, breaking, deso- 
late heart that beat in her like a caged bird’s. 

“ He will come ; I am sure he will come,” she 
said to herself ; but she was so tired, and it was so 
long — oh, dear God ! — so very long. 

A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill voice 
of Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, broken with 
anguish, called through the hanging ivy, — 

“ Beb^e, you are a wicked one, they say, but the 
only one there is at home in the village this day. 
Get you to town for the love of Heaven, and send 
Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my flower, my child 
lies dying, and not a soul near, and she black as a 
coal with choking — go, go, go ! — and Mary will for- 
give you your sins. Save the little one, dear Bebee, 
do you hear ? and I will pray God and speak fair 
the neighbors for you. Go !” 



207 


208 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Bebee rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar 
sound of a human voice, and looked at the breath- 
less mother with eyes of pitying wonder. 

‘‘ Surely I will go,’’ she said, gently ; “ but there 
is no need to bribe me. I have not sinned greatly 
— that I know.” 

Then she went out quickly and ran through the 
lanes and into the city for the sick child, and found 
the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand 
rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct 
than in any reasoning consciousness of doing good. 

When she was moving through the once-famil- 
iar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the 
golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes 
were ringing from the many towers, a strange 
Sense of unreality, of non-existence, fell upon her. 

Could it be she? — she indeed — who had gone 
there the year before the gladdest thing that the 
earth bore, with no care except to shelter her 
flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blos- 
soms for the burgomaster’s housewife ? 

She did not think thus to herself ; but a vague 
doubt that she could ever have been the little gay, 
laborious, happy Bebee, with troops of friends and 
endless joys for every day that dawned, came over 
her as she went by the black front of the Broodhuis. 

The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit-girl, jarred 
on her as she passed the stall under its yellow awn- 
ing that was flapping sullenly in the evening wind. 

“Oh he, little fool,” the mocking voice cried, 
“ the rind of the flne pine is full of prickles, and 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


209 


stings the lips when the taste is gone ? — to be sure 
— crack common nuts like me, and you are never 
wanting — hazels grow free in every copse. Prut, 
tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the stu- 
dents read out of this just now; and you such a 
simpleton as not to get a roll of napoleons out of 
him before he went to rot in Paris. I dare say he 
was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth. He 
was only a painter after all.’^ 

Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in 
which she was wrapping gentians : it was a piece 
of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it there 
was a single line or so which said that the artist 
Flamen, whose Gretchen was the wonder of the 
Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in his rooms 
in Paris. 

Bebee stood and read ; the strong ruddy western 
light upon the type, the taunting laughter of the 
fruit-girl on her ear. 

A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the 
cruelty of Lisa’s mirth stop in a sudden terror. 

She stood staring like a thing changed to stone 
down on the one name that to her tilled all the 
universe. 

“Ill — he is ill — do you hear?” she echoed pite- 
ously, looking at Lisa ; “ and you say he is poor ?” 

“ Poor? for sure I is he not a painter?” said the 
fruit-girl, roughly. She judged by her own penni- 
less student-lads ; and she was angered with herself 
for feeling sorrow for this little silly thing that she 
had loved to torture. 

18 * 0 


210 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“You have been bad and base to me; but now 
— I bless you, I love you, I will pray for you,’’ 
said Bebee, in a swift broken breath, and with a 
look upon her face that startled into pain her cal- 
lous enemy. 

Then without another word, she thrust the paper 
in her bosom, and ran out of the square breathless 
with haste and with a great resolve. 

He was ill — and he was poor ! The brave little 
soul of her leaped at once to action. He was sick, 
and far away ; and poor they said. All danger and 
all difficulty faded to nothing before the vision of 
his need. 

Bebee was only a little foundling who ran about 
in wooden shoes ; but she had the “ dog’s soul” in 
her — the soul that will follow faithfully though to 
receive a curse, that will defend loyally though to 
meet a blow, and that will die mutely loving to the 
last. 

She went home, how she never knew ; and with* 
out the delay of a moment packed up a change of 
linen, and fed the fowls and took the key of the 
hut down to old Jehan’s cabin. The old man was 
only half-witted by reason of his affliction for his 
dead daughter, but he was shrewd enough to un- 
derstand what she wanted of him, and honest 
enough to do it. 

“ I am going into the city,” she said to him ; 
“ and if I am not back to-night, will you feed the 
starling and the hens, and water the flowers for 
me ?” 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 211 

Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice ; it was 
seven in the evening, and he was going to hed. 

“What are you after, little one?” he asked; 
“ going to show the fine buckles at a students* 
ball ? Nay, fie— that is not like you.” 

“I am going to — pray,— dear Jehan,” she an- 
swered, with a sob in her throat and the first false- 
hood she ever had told. “ Do what I ask you — 
do for your dead daughter’s sake — or the birds and 
the fiowers will die of hunger and thirst. Take the 
key and promise me.” 

He took the key, and promised. 

“ Do not let them see those buckles shine ; they 
will rob you,*’ he added. 

Bebee ran from him fast ; every moment that 
was lost was so precious and so terrible. To pause a 
second for fear’s sake never occurred to her. She 
went forth as fearlessly as a young swallow, born in 
northern April days, flies forth on instinct to new 
lands and over unknown seas when autumn falls. 

Necessity and action breathed new life into her. 
The hardy and brave peasant ways of her were 
awoke once more. She had been strong to wait 
silently with the young life in her dying out drop 
by drop in the heart-sickness of long delay. She 
was strong now to throw herself into strange coun- 
tries and dim perils and immeasurable miseries, on 
the sole chance that she might be of service to him. 

A few human souls here and there can love like 
doses. Bebee’s was one. 

O 



CHAPTER XXVIL 



and 


T was dark. The May days are short in 
the north lands of the Scheldt. 

She had her little winter cloak of frieze 
her wooden shoes and her little white cap, 


with the sunny curls rippling out of it in their 
pretty rebellion. She had her little lantern too; 
and her bundle; and she had put a few fresh eggs 
in her basket, with some sweet herbs and the 
palm-sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last 
Easter — for who could tell, she thought, how ill 
he might not be, or how poor ? 

She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran by 
its garden gate ; all her heart was on in front, in 
the vague far-off country where he lay sick unto 
death. 

She ran fast through the familiar lanes into the 
city. She was not very sure where Paris was, but 
she had the name clear and firm, and she knew 
that people were always coming and going thence 
and thither, so that she had no fear she should not 
find it. 

She went straight to the big busy bewildering 
place in the Leopold quarter where the iron horses 
212 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


213 


fumed every day and night along the iron ways. 
She had never been there before, but she knew it 
was by that great highway that the traffic to Paris 
was carried on, and she knew that it would carry 
people also as well. 

There were bells clanging, lights flashing, and 
crowds pushing and shouting, as she ran up — a 
little gray figure, with the lantern-spark glimmer- 
ing like any tiny glow-worm astray in a gas-lit city. 

To Paris V she asked, entreatingly, going 
where she saw others going, to a little grated 
wicket in a wall. 

“ Twenty-seven francs — quick !” they demanded 
of her. 

Bebee gave a great cry, and stood still, trembling 
and trying not to sob aloud. She had never 
thought of money ; she had forgotten that youth 
and strength and love and willing feet and piteous 
prayers — all went for nothing as this world is made. 

A hope flashed on her, and a glad thought. She 
loosed the silver buckles, and held them out. 

“ Would you take these ? They are worth much 
more.” 

There was a derisive laughter; some one bade 
here with an oath begone ; rough shoulders jostled 
her away. She stretched her arms out piteously. 

“ Take me — oh, pray take me ! I will go with 
the sheep, with the cattle — only, only, take me !” 

But in the rush and roar none heeded her; 
some thief snatched the silver buckles from her 
hand, and made off with them and was lost in the 


214 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


throng ; a great iron beast rushed by her, snorting 
flame and bellowing smoke ; there was a roll like 
thunder, and all was dark ; the night express had 
passed on its way to Paris. 

Bebee stood still, crushed for a moment with 
the noise and the cruelty and the sense of abso- 
lute desolation; she scarcely noticed that the 
buckles had been stolen ; she had only one 
thought — to get to Paris. 

“ Can I never go without money ?” she asked 
at the wicket ; the man there glanced a moment, 
with a touch of pity, at the little wistful face. 

“ The least is twenty francs — surely you must 
know that he said, and shut his grating with a 
clang. 

Bebee turned away and went out of the great 
cruel tumultuous place ; her heart ached and her 
brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage of her 
nature rose to need. 

“ There is no way at all to go without money 
to Paris, I suppose ?” she asked of an old woman 
whom she knew a little, who sold nuts and little 
pictures of saints and wooden playthings under the 
trees, in the avenue hard by. 

The old woman shook her head. 

“Eh? — no, dear. There is nothing to be done 
anywhere in the world without money. Look, I 
cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless I pay be- 
forehand.’^ 

“ Would it be far to walk ?” 

“ Far ! Holy Jesus ! It is right away in the heart 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


215 


of France — over two hundred miles, they say; 
straight out through the forest. Not hut what my 
son did walk it once — and he a shoemaker, who 
knows what walking costs; and he is well-to-do 
there now — not that he ever writes. When they 
want nothing people never write.” 

“ And he walked into Paris ?” 

“Yes, ten years ago. He had nothing but a few 
sous and an ash stick, and he had a fancy to try 
his luck there. And after all our feet were given 
us to travel with. If you go there and you see 
him, tell him to send me something — I am tired 
of selling nuts.” 

Bebee said nothing, but went on her road ; since 
there was no other way but to walk she would take 
that way ; the distance and the hardship did not 
appal two little feet that were used to traverse so 
many miles of sun-baked summer dust and of 
frozen winter mud unblenchingly year after year. 

The time it would take made her heart sink in- 
deed. He was ill. God knew what might happen. 
But neither the length of leagues nor the fatigue of 
body daunted her. She only saw his eyes dim with 
pain and his lips burned with fever. 

She would walk twenty miles a day, and then, 
perhaps, she might get lifts here and there on hay- 
wagons or in peddlers^ carts ; people had always 
used to be kind to her. Anyhow she counted she 
might reach Paris well in fifteen days. 

She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment, 
and counted the copper pieces she had on her; 


216 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


they were few, and the poor pretty buckles that 
she might have sold to get money, were stolen. 

She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs; 
she thought she might live on that; she had 
wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to 
keep life in her until she could reach Paris was 
the one great thing. 

What a blessing it is to have been born poor ; 
and to have lived hardly — one wants so little V she 
thought to herself. 

Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom of 
her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and knelt 
down in the quiet darkness and prayed a moment, 
with the hot agonized tears rolling down her face, 
and then rose and stepped out bravely in the cool 
of the night, on the great southwest road towards 
Paris. 

The thought never once crossed her to turn back, 
and go again into the shelter of her own little hut 
among the flowers. He was sick there, dying, for 
anything she knew — that was the only thing she 
remembered. 

It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the 
fragrance of the spring was borne in from the wide 
green plains, and the streams where the rushes 
were blowing. 

She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray 
shadow all about her. She had never been so far 
from home in all her life, except to that one Ker- 
messe at Mechlin. But she was not afraid. 

With the movement, and the air, and the sense 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


217 


that she was going to him, which made her happy 
even in her misery, something of the old, sweet, 
lost fancies came to her. 

She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as 
the poplars swayed and murmured in the wind, 
they looked to her like the wings and the swords 
of a host of angels. 

Her way lay out through the forest, and in that 
sweet green woodland she was not afraid — no more 
afraid than the fawns were. 

At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed. Here 
there were the open-air restaurants, and the cafe 
gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers from the 
city ; here there were music and laughter, and 
horses with brass bells, and bright colors on high 
in the wooden balconies, and below among the 
blossoming hawthorn hedges. She had to go 
through it all, and she shuddered a little as she 
ran, thinking of that one priceless, deathless forest 
day when he had kissed her first. 

But the pleasure-people were all busied with 
their mirth and mischief, and took no notice of the 
little gray figure in the starry night. She went on 
along the grassy roads, under the high arching 
trees, with the hoot of the owls and the cry of the 
rabbits on the stillness. 

At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest, mid- 
night was striking as she entered the village. 
Every one was asleep. The lights were all out. 
The old ruined priory frowned dark under the 
clouds. 

19 


218 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


She shivered a little again, and began to feel 
chill and tired, yet did not dare to knock at any 
one of the closed house-doors — she had no money. 

So she walked on her first ten unknown miles, 
meeting a few people only, and being altogether 
unmolested — a small gray figure, trotting in two 
little wooden shoes. 

They thought her a peasant going to a fair or a 
lace-mill, and no one did her more harm than to 
wish her good-night in rough Flemish. 

When the dawn began to whiten above the plains 
of the east, she saw an empty cowshed filled with 
hay ; she was a little tired, and lay down and rested 
an hour or two, as a young lamb might have lain 
on the dried clover, for she knew that she must 
keep her strength and husband her power, or never 
reach across the dreary length of the foreign land 
to Paris. 

But by full sunrise she was on her way again, 
bathing her face in a brook and buying a sou’s 
worth of bread and fiet-milk at the first cottage 
that she passed in bright, leaf-bowered Hoeylaert. 

The forest was still all around her, with its ex- 
quisite life of bough and blossom, and murmur of 
insect and of bird. She told her beads, praying as 
she went, and was almost happy. 

God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till she 
bad kissed him once more, and could die with him. 

The hares ran across the path, and the blue but- 
terfiies flew above-head. There was purple gloom 
of pinewood, and sparkling verdure of aspen and 


TJFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 219 

elm. There were distant church carillons ringing, 
and straight golden shafts of sunshine streaming 

She was quite sure God would not let him die. 

She hoped that he might be very poor. At times 
he had talked as if he were, and then she might be 
of so much use. She knew how to deal with fever 
and suffering. She had sat up many a night with 
the children of the village. The gray sisters had 
taught her many of their ways of battling with 
disease; and she could make fresh cool drinks, 
and she could brew beautiful remedies from simple 
herbs. There was so much that she might do ; her 
fancy played with it almost happily. And then, only 
to touch his hand, only to hear his voice; her heart 
rose at the thought, as a lark to its morning song. 

At Eixensart, buried in its greenery, as she went 
through it in morning light, some peasants greeted 
her cheerily, and called to her to rest in a house- 
porch, and gave her honey and bread. She could 
not eat much; her tongue was parched and her 
throat was dry, but the kindness was precious to 
her, and she went on her road the stronger for it. 

‘‘It is a long way to walk to Paris,” said the 
woman, with some curious wonder. Bebee smiled, 
though her eyes grew wet. 

“ She has the look of the little Gesh,” said the 
Rixensart people, and they watched her away with 
a vague timid pity. 

So she went on through Ottignies and La Roche, 
to Villers, and left the great woods and the city 
chimes behind her, and came through the green 


220 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleu- 
rus, and so into the coal and iron fields that lie 
round Charleroi. 

Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank 
under the noise and the haste, before the blackness 
and the hideousness. She had never seen anything 
like it She thought it was hell, with the naked, 
swearing, fighting people, and the red fires leaping 
night and day. Nevertheless, if hell it were, since 
it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to brave 
and cross it. 

The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, 
rough and fierce and hard, frightened her. The 
women did not look like women, and the children 
ran and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. 
The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the 
trees were seared and brown. There was no peace 
in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand 
folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and 
swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multi- 
plied, in joyless and endless wrestling against 
hunger and death. 

She got through it somehow, hiding often from 
the ferocious youngsters, and going sleepless rather 
than lie in those dens of filth; but she seemed so 
many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last 
behind her — so many, many years older than when 
she had sat and spun in the garden at home. 

When she was once in the valley of the Sambre 
she was more herself again, only she felt weaker 
than she had ever done, because she only dared to 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 221 

spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so 
little food. 

In the woods and fields about Alne she began to 
breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air after 
being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn, green 
boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church-bells, 
humming of golden bees, cradle songs of women 
spinning, homely odors of little herb-gardens and 
of orchard-trees under cottage walls — these had 
been around her all her life ; she only breathed 
freely among them. 

She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were 
wearing so thin that the hot dust of the road at 
noonday burnt her feet through them. Sometimes, 
too, she felt a curious brief faintness such aa she 
had never known, for the lack of food and the long 
fatigue began to tell even on her hardy little body. 

But she went on bravely, rarely doing less than 
her twenty miles a day, and sometimes more, walk- 
ing often in the night to save time, and lying down 
in cow-sheds or under haystacks in the noontide. 

For the most part people were kind to her; 
they saw she was so very young and so poor. 

Women would give her leave to bathe herself 
in their bed-chambers, and children would ask her 
to wait on the village bench under the chestnut- 
tree, while they brought her their pet lamb or 
their tumbler pigeons to look at, but, for the most 
part — unless she was very, very tired — she would 
not wait. It took her so long, and who could tell 
how it fared with him in Paris ? 
m 


222 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


Into the little churches, scattered over the wide 
countries between Charleroi and Erquelinnes, she 
would turn aside, indeed; but, then, that was only 
to say a prayer for him ; that was not loss to him, 
but gain. 

So she walked on until she reached the frontier 
of France. She began to get a little giddy ; she 
began to see the blue sky and the green level 
always swirling round her as if some one were 
spinning them to frighten her, but still she would 
not be afraid; she went on, and on, and on, till 
she set her last step on the soil of Flanders. 

Here a new strange, terrible, incomprehensible 
obstacle opposed her: she had no papers; they 
thrust her back and spoke to her as if she were a 
criminal. She could not understand what they 
could mean. She had never heard of these laws 
and rules. She vaguely comprehended that she 
must not enter France, and stunned and heart 
broken she dropped down under a tree, and for 
the first time sobbed as if her very life would 
weep itself away. 

She could see nothing, understand nothing. 
There were the same road, the same hedges, the 
same fields, the same white cottages, and peasants 
in blue shirts and dun-hued oxen in the wagons. 
She saw no mark, no difierence, ere they told her 
where she stood was Belgium, and where they stood 
was France, and that she must not pass from one 
into the other. 

The men took no notice of her. They went 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 223 

back into their guard-house, and smoked and 
drank. A cat sunned herself under a scarlet bean. 
The white clouds sailed on before a southerly sky. 
She might die here — he there — and nothing seemed 
to care. 

After awhile an old hawker came up ; he was 
traveling with wooden clocks from the Black For- 
est. He stopped and looked at her, and asked her 
what she ailed. 

She knelt down at his feet in the dust. 

“ Oh, help me !” she cried to him. “ Oh, pray, 
help me ! I have walked all the way from Brussels 
— that is my country, and now they will not let me 
pass that house where the soldiers are. They say I 
have no papers. What papers should I have ? I do 
not know. When one has done no harm, and does 
not owe a sou anywhere, and has walked all the 
way — Is it money that they want ? I have none ; 
and they stole my silver clasps in Brussels ; and if 
I do not get to Paris I must die — die without see- 
ing him again — ever again, dear God 

She dropped her head upon the dust and 
crouched and sobbed there, her courage broken 
by this new barrier that she had never dreamed 
would come between herself and Paris. 

The old hawker looked at her thoughtfully. He 
had seen much of men and women, and knew 
truth from counterfeit, and he was moved by the 
child’s agony. 

He stooped and whispered in her ear, — 

“ Get up quick, and I will pass you. It is against 


224 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


the law, and I may go to prison for it. I^ever 
mind ; one must risk something in this world, or 
else be a cur. My daughter has stayed behind in 
Marbais sweethearting ; her name is on my pass- 
port, and her age and face will do for yours. Get 
up and follow me close, and I will get you through. 
Poor little soul! whatever your woe is it is real 
enough, and you are such a young and pretty thing. 
Get up, the guards are in their house, they have not 
seen ; follow me, and you must not speak a word ; 
they must take you for a German, dumb as wood.” 

She got up and obeyed him, not comprehending, 
but only vaguely seeing that he was friendly to 
her, and would pass her over into France. 

The old man made a little comedy at the barrier, 
and scolded her as though she were his daughter 
for losing her way as she came to meet him, and 
then crying like a baby. 

The guards looked at her carelessly, joked the 
hawker on her pretty face, looked the papers over, 
and let her through, believing her the child of the 
clock-maker of the Hartz. Some lies are blessed 
as truth. 

“ I have done wrong in the law, but not before 
God, I think, little one,” said the peddler. “Nay 
— do not thank me, or go on like that ; we are in 
sight of the customs men still, and if they suspected, 
it would be the four walls of a cell only that you 
and I should see to-night. And now tell me your 
story, poor maiden — why are you on foot through 
a strange country ?” 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 225 

But Bebee would not tell him her story; she 
was confused and dazed still. She did not know 
rightly what had happened to her ; but she could not 
talk of herself, nor of why she traveled thus to Paris. 

The old hawker got cross at her silence, and 
called her an unthankful jade, and wished that he 
had left her to her fate, and parted company with 
her at two cross-roads, saying his path did not lie 
with hers ; and then when he had done that, was 
sorry, and being a tender-hearted soul, hobbled 
back, and would fain press a five-franc piece on 
her; and Bebee, refusing it all the while, kissed 
his old brown hands and blessed him, and, broke 
away from him, and so went on again solitary 
towards St. Quentin. 

The country was very fiat and poor, and yet the 
plains had a likeness in them to her own wide 
Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was 
blowing and the barges dropping down the slug- 
gish streams. 

She was very footsore ; very weary ; very hungry 
so often ; but she was in France — in his country ; 
— and her spirit rose with the sense of that near- 
ness to him. 

After all God was so good to her ; there were fine 
bright days and nights ; a few showers had fallen, 
but merely passing ones ; the air was so cool and 
60 balmy that it served her almost as food ; and she 
seldom found people so unkind that they refused 
for her single little sou to give her a crust of bread 
and let her lie in an outhouse. 


226 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


After all God was very good ; and by the six- 
teenth or seventeenth day she would be in the city 
of Paris. 

She was a little light-headed at times from in- 
sufficient nourishment; especially after waking 
from strange dreams in unfamiliar places ; some- 
times the soil felt tremulous under her, and the 
sky spun round; but she struggled against the 
feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to be 
afraid of nothing. 

Sometimes at night she thought she saw old 
Annemie. ‘‘But what if I do?” she said to her- 
self ; “ Annemie never will hurt me.” 

And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her nat- 
ural buoyancy of spirit returned as it had never 
done to her since the evening that he had kissed 
and left her. As her body grew lighter and more 
exhausted, her fancy grew keener and more domi- 
nant. All things of the earth and air spoke to her 
as she went along as they had used to do. All that 
she had learned from the books in the long cold 
months came to her clear and wonderful. She was 
not so very ignorant now — ignorant, indeed, beside 
him — but still knowing something that would make 
her able to read to him if he liked it, and to under- 
stand if he talked of grave things. 

She had no fixed thought of what she would be 
to him when she reached him. 

She fancied she would wait on him, and tend 
him, and make him well, and be caressed by him, 
and get all gracious pretty things of leaf and bios- 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 227 

• 

Bom about him, and kneel at his feet, and be quite 
happy if he only touched her now and then with 
his lips; — her thoughts went no further than that; 
— her love for him was of that intensity and ab- 
sorption in which nothing but itself is remem- 
bered. 

When a creature loves much, even when it is as 
little and as simple a soul as Bebee, the world and 
all its people and all its laws and ways are as 
naught. They cease to exist; they are as though 
they had never been. 

Whoever recollects an outside world may play 
with passion, or may idle with sentiment, but does 
not love. 

She did not hear what the villagers said to her. 
She did not see the streets of the towns as she 
passed them. She kept herself clean always, and 
broke fast now and then by sheer instinct of 
habit, nothing more. She had no perception what 
she did, except of walking — walking — walking 
always, and seeing the white road go by like pale 
ribbons unrolled. 

She got a dreamy, intense, sleepless light in her 
blue eyes that frightened some of those she passed. 
They thought she had been fever-stricken, and was 
not in her senses. 

So she went across the dreary lowlands, wearing 
out her little sabots, but not wearing out her 
patience and her courage. 

She was very dusty and jaded. Her woolen 
skirt was stained with weather and torn with 


228 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


briers. But she had managed always to wash her 
cap white in brook-water, and she had managed 
always to keep her pretty bright curls soft and 
silken — for he had liked them so much, and he 
would soon draw them through his hand again. 
So she told herself a thousand times to give her 
strength when the mist would come over her sight, 
and the earth would seem to tremble as she went. 
On the fifteenth day from the night when she had 
left her hut by the swans’ water, Bebee saw Paris. 

Shining away in the sun ; white and gold ; 
among woods and gardens she saw Paris. 

She was so tired — oh, so tired — but she could 
not rest now. There were bells ringing always in 
her ears, and a heavy pain always in her head. 
But what of that ? — she was so near to him. 

“ Are you ill, you little thing ?” a woman asked 
her who was gathering early cherries in the out- 
skirts of the great city. 

Bebee looked at her and smiled : I do not know 
— I am happy.” 

And she went onward. 

It was evening. The sun had set. She had not 
eaten for twenty-four hours. But she could not 
pause for anything now. She crossed the gleam- 
ing river, and she heard the cathedral chimes. 
Paris in all its glory was about her, but she took no 
more note of it than a pigeon that flies through it 
intent on reaching home. 

1^0 one looked at or stopped her ; a little dusty 
peasant with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


229 


The click-clack of her wooden shoes on the hot 
pavements made none look up ; little rustics came 
up every day like this to make their fortunes in 
Paris. Some grew into golden painted silken 
flowers, the convolvuli of their brief summer days ; 
and some drifted into the Seine water, rusted, wind- 
tossed, fallen leaves, that were wanted of no man. 
Anyhow it was so common to see them, pretty but 
homely things, with their noisy shoes and their 
little all in a bundle, that no one even looked once 
at Bebee. 

She was not bewildered. As she had gone 
through her own city, only thinking of the roses 
in her basket and of old Annemie in her garret, so 
she went through Paris, only thinking of him for 
whose sake she had come thither. 

Now that she was really in his home she was 
^i^PPy though her head ached with that 
dull odd pain, and all the sunny glare went round 
and round like a great gilded humming-top, such 
as the babies clapped their hands at at the Ker- 
messe. 

She was happy ; she felt sure now that God would 
not let him die till she got to him. She was quite 
glad that he had left her all that long, terrible win- 
ter, for she had learned so much and was so much 
more fitted to be with him. 

Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in her 
head made her feel, she was happy, very happy ; 
a warm flush came on her little pale cheeks as she 
thought how soon he would kiss them, her whole 
20 


230 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


body thrilled with the old sweet nameless joy that 
she had sickened for in vain so long. 

, Though she saw nothing else that was around 
her, she saw some little knots of moss-roses that a 
girl was selling on the quay, as she used to sell 
them in front of the Maison du Roi. She had only 
two sous left, but she stopped and bought two little 
rosebuds to take to him. He had used to care for 
them so much in the summer in Brabant. 

The girl who sold them told her the way to the 
street he lived in ; it was not very far off the. quay. 
She seemed to float on air, to have wings, like the 
swallows, to hear beautiful music all around. She 
felt for her beads, and said aves of praise. God 
was so good. 1 . 

It was quite night when she reached the street, 
and sought the number of >his house. She spoke 
his name softly, and trembling very much with 
joy, not with any fear, but it seemed to her too 
sacred a thing ever to utter aloud. . 

An old man looked out of a den by the door, 
and told her to go straight up the stairs to the 
third floor, and then turn to the right. The old 
man chuckled as he glanced after her, and listened 
to the wooden shoes pattering wearily up the broad 
stone steps. 

Bebee climbed them— ten, twenty, thirty, forty. 
“ He must be very poor !’’ she thought, “ to live so 
high,” and yet the place was wide and handsome, 
and had a look of riches. Her heart beat so fast, 
she felt suffocated ; her limbs shook, her eyes had 



There was a fantastic gloom from old armor and old weapons ‘ 
and old pictures in the dull rich chamoers. 






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TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 231 

a red blood-like mist floating before them ; but she 
thanked God each step she climbed — a moment, 
and she would look upon the only face she loved. 

“He will be glad; — oh, I am sure he will be 
glad she said to herself, as a fear that had never 
before come near her touched her for a moment — 
if he should not care ? 

But even then, what did it matter? Since he 
was ill she should be there to watch him night and 
day; and when he was well again, if he should 
wish her to go away — one could always die. 

“But he will be glad — oh, I know he will be 
glad !” she said to the rosebuds that she carried to 
him. “ And if God will only let me save his life, 
what else do I want more 

His name was written on a door before her. 
The handle of a bell hung down ; she pulled it 
timidly. The door unclosed ; she saw no one, and 
went through. There were low lights burning. 
There were heavy scents that were strange to her. 
There was a fantastic gloom from old armor, and 
old weapons, and old pictures in the dull rich 
chambers. The sound of her wooden shoes was 
lost in the softness and thickness of the carpets. 

It was not the home of a poor man. A great 
terror froze her heart; — if she were not wanted 
here ? 

She went quickly through three rooms, seeing 
no one, and at the end of the third there were fold- 
ing-doors. 

“ It is I — Bebee,” she said softly, as she pushed 


232 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


them gently apart ; and she held out the two moss- 
rosebuds. 

Then the words died on her lips, and a great 
horror froze her, still and silent, there. 

She saw the dusky room as in a dream. She saw 
him stretched on the bed, leaning on his elbow, 
laughing, and playing cards upon the lace coverlet 
She saw women with loose shining hair and bare 
limbs, and rubies and diamonds glimmering red 
and white. She saw men lying about upon the 
couch, throwing dice and drinking and laughing 
one with another. 

Beyond all she saw against the pillows of his bed 
a beautiful brown wicked-looking thing like some 
velvet snake, who leaned over him as he threw 
down the painted cards upon the lace, and who had 
cast about his throat her curved bare arm with the 
great coils of dead gold all a-glitter on it. 

And above it all there were odors of wines and 
flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter, music 
of shrill gay voices. 

She stood like a frozen creature and saw — the 
rosebuds in her hand. Then with a great piercing 
cry she let the little roses fall, and turned and 
fled. At the sound he looked up and saw her, 
and shook his beautiful brown harlot ofi* him with 
an oath. 

But Bebee flew down through the empty cham- 
bers and the long stairway as a hare flies from the 
hounds; her tired feet never paused, her aching 
limbs never slackened ; she ran on and on, and on, 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 233 

into the lighted streets, into the fresh night air; 
on, and on, and on, straight to the river. 

From its brink some man’s strength caught and 
held her. She struggled with it. 

“ Let me die ! let me die !” she shrieked to him, 
and strained from him to get at the cool gray 
silent water that waited for her there. 

Then she lost all consciousness, and saw the stars 
no more. 

When she came back to any sense of life, the 
stars were shining still, and the face of Jeannot 
was bending over her, wet with tears. 

He had followed her to Paris when they had 
missed her first, and had come straight by train to 
the city, making sure it was thither she had come, 
and there had sought her many days, watching for 
her by the house of Flamen. 

She shuddered away from him as he held her, 
and looked at him with blank tearless eyes. 

“Do not touch me — take me home.” 

That was all she ever said to him. She never 
asked him or told him anything. She never 
noticed that it was strange that he should have 
been here upon the river-bank. He let her be, 
and took her silently in the cool night back by the 
iron ways to Brabant. 



CHAPTER XXYIIL 

H HE sat quite still and upright in the wagon, 
with the dark lands rushing by her. She 
never spoke at all. She had a look that 
frightened him upon her face. When he tried to 
touch her hand, she shivered away from him. 

The charcoal-burner, hardy and strong among 
forest-reared men, cowered like a child in a corner, 
and covered his eyes and wept. 

So the night wore away. 

She had no perception of anything that hap- 
pened to her until she was led through her own 
little garden in the early day, and her starling 
cried to her “Bonjour, Bonjour!” Even then she 
only looked about her in a bewildered way, and 
never spoke. 

Were the sixteen days a dream? 

She did not know. 

The women whom Jeannot summoned, his 
mother and sisters, and Mere Krebs, and one or 
two others, weeping for what had been the hard- 
ness of their hearts against her, undressed her, and 
laid her down on her little bed, and opened the 
shutters to the radiance of the sun. 

234 



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 235 

She let them do as they liked, only she seemed 
neither to hear nor speak, and she never spoke. 

All that Jeannot could tell was that he had found 
her in Paris, and had saved her from the river. 

The women were sorrowful, and reproached them- 
selves. Perhaps she had done wrong, but they had 
been harsh, and she was so young. 

The two little sabots with the holes worn through 
the soles touched them; and they blamed them- 
selves for having shut their hearts and their doors 
against her as they saw the fixed blue eyes, without 
any light in them, and the pretty mouth closed 
close against either sob or smile. 

After all she was Bebee — the little bright blithe 
thing that had danced with their children, and sung 
to their singing, and brought them always the first 
roses of the year. If she had been led astray, they 
should have been gentler with her. 

So they told themselves and each other. 

What had she seen in that terrible Paiis to 
change her like this? — they could not tell. She 
never spoke. 

The cock crowed gayly to the sun. The lamb 
bleated in the meadow. The bees boomed among 
the pear-tree blossoms. The gray lavender blew 
in the open house-door. The green leaves .nrew 
shifting shadows on the floor. 

All things were just the same as they had been 
the year before, when she had woke to the joy of 
being a girl of sixteen. 

But Bebee now lay quite still and silent on her 


236 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


little bed ; as quiet as the waxen Gesii that they 
laid in the manger at the Nativity. 

“ If she would only speak !^’ the women and the 
children wailed, weeping sorely. 

But she never spoke ; nor did she seem to know 
any one of them. Not even the starling, as he flew 
on her pillow and called her. 

“ Give her rest,” they all said ; and one by one 
moved away, being poor folk and hard-working, 
and unable to lose a whole day. 

M^re Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot sat in 
the porch where her little spinning-wheel stood, 
and rocked himself to and fro; in vain agony, 
powerless. 

He had done all he could, and it was of no 
avail. 

Then people who had loved her, hearing, came 
up the green lanes from the city — the cobbler and 
the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints’ 
pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children 
hung about the garden wicket, frightened and 
sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands, 
and said only over and over again, “Another dead 
— another dead! — the red mill and I see them all 
dead!” 

The long golden day drifted away, and the swans 
swayed to and fro, and the willows grew silver in 
the sunshine. 

Beb6e, only, lay quite still and never spoke. The 
starling sat above her head ; his wings drooped, 
and he was silent too. 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 237 

Towards sunset Bebee raised herself and called 
aloud : they ran to her. 

“ Get me a rosebud — one with the moss round 
it,” she said to them. 

They went out into the garden, and brought her 
one wet with dew. 

She kissed it, and laid it in one of her little 
wooden shoes that stood upon the bed. 

“ Send them to him,” she said wearily ; “ tell 
him I walked all the way.” 

Then her head drooped ; then momentary con- 
sciousness died out : the old dull lifeless look crept 
over her face again like the shadow of death. 

The starling spread his broad black wings above 
her head. She lay quite still once more. The 
women left the rosebud in the wooden shoe, not 
knowing what she meant. 

Night fell. Mere Krebs watched beside her. 
Jeannot went down to the old church to beseech 
heaven with all his simple, ignorant, tortured soul. 
The villagers hovered about, talking in low sad 
voices, and wondering, and dropping one by one 
into their homes. They were sorry, very sorry; 
but what could they do ? 

It was quite night. The lights were put out in 
the lane. Jeannot, with Father Francis, prayed 
before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows. Mere 
Krebs slumbered in her rush-bottomed chair ; she 
was old and worked hard. The starling was 
awake. 

Bebee rose in her bed, and looked around, as 


238 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


she had done when she had asked for the moss- 
rosebud. 

A sense of unutterable universal pain ached over 
all her body. 

She did not see her little home, its four white 
walls, its lattice shining in the moon, its wooden 
bowls and plates, its oaken shelf and presses, its 
plain familiar things that once had been so dear : — 
she did not see them ; — she only saw the brown 
woman with her arm about his throat. 

She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet on to 
the floor; the pretty little rosy feet that he had 
used to want to clothe in silken stockings. 

Poor little feet! she felt a curious compassion 
for them ; — they had served her so well, and they 
were so tired. 

She sat up a moment with that curious dull 
agony, aching everywhere in body and in brain. 
She kissed the rosebud once more, and laid it 
gently down in the wooden shoe. She did not see 
anything that was around her. She felt a great 
dullness that closed in on her ; a great weight that 
was like iron on her head. 

She thought she was in the strange, noisy, cruel 
city, with the river close to her, and all her dead 
dreams drifting down it like murdered children, 
whilst that woman kissed him. 

She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose 
and stood upright. There was a door open to the 
moonlight — the door where she had sat spinning 
and singing in a thousand happy days ; the laven- 


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


239 


der blew ; the tall, unbudded green lilies swayed 
in the wind ; she looked at them, and knew none 
of them. 

The night air drifted through her linen dress, and 
played on her bare arms, and lifted the curls of 
her hair ; the same air that had played with her so 
many times out of mind when she had been a little 
tottering thing that measured its height by the red 
rosebush. But it brought her no sense of where 
she was. 

All she saw was the woman who kissed him. 

There was the water beyond ; the kindly calm 
water, all green with the moss and the nests of the 
ouzels and the boughs of the hazels and willows, 
where the swans were asleep in the reeds, and the 
broad lilies spread wide and cool. 

But she did not see any memory in it. She 
thought it was the cruel gray river in the strange 
white city ; and she cried to it ; and went out into 
the old familiar ways, and knew none of them ; 
and ran feebly yet fleetly through the bushes and 
flowers, looking up once at the stars with a help- 
less broken blind look, like a thing that is dying. 

“ He does not want me !” she said to them, 
“ He does not want me ! — other women kiss him 
there !” 

Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird^s 
when its wings are shot, and yet it tries to rise, she 
hovered a moment over the water, and stretched 
her arms out to it. 

“ He does not want me !” she murmured ; “ he 


240 


TIFO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


does not want me — and I am so tired. Dear 
God P’ 

Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps to 
its mother, and threw herself forward, and let the 
green dark waters take her where they had found 
her amidst the lilies, a little laughing yearling 
thing. 

There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her face 
turned to the stars, and the starling poised above 
to watch her as she slept. 

She had been only Bebee — the ways of God and 
man had been too hard for her. 

When the messengers of Flamen came that day, 
they took him back a dead moss-rose and a pair of 
little wooden shoes worn through with walking. 

“ One creature loved me once,” he says to women 
who wonder why the wooden shoes are there. 


THE END. 


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